Category Archives: Book

Perfectly “Lovecraftian” – From Beyond

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I make a lot of plans. For example, I’ve got a long spreadsheet for this blog, listing things I know I want to cover – I don’t have it all scheduled, but I know what I want to devote my time to, and there are topics I’m really looking forward to eventually dealing with. But “the best laid plans of mice and men” and all that…sometimes you just see something and have such a strong response that it jumps to the front of the line, and that’s what happened with today’s movie, Stuart Gordon’s 1986 adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story, “From Beyond.” But hey, at least when my plans go askew, no one gets an eye sucked out…which only happens once in this movie, but it is memorable.

Now, I’d watched this before about nine years ago, but I think conditions weren’t right for me to really appreciate what was on offer. I was watching it in the background while I was in the kitchen, baking cookies, and though I remember basically enjoying the movie, it hadn’t done a whole lot for me – fair as I hadn’t given much to it, myself. But a few weeks ago, I got home on a hot Saturday afternoon, exhausted and desperately needing a bit of easy fun as a reprieve from the summer heat and my other responsibilities, and as this had just popped up on Shudder, I gave it another try and just LOVED it.

So let’s get into it. I expect this will be short (though that expectation is often wrong) as I mostly just want to shower praise upon the film, and I’m certain there will be spoilers…

From Beyond (1986)

An immediate follow up to his cult breakout hit, Re-Animator (also based on a bit of Lovecraft) from just one year earlier, this was Stuart Gordon’s second feature, bringing back Barbara Crampton and Jeffrey Combs from the first film, as well as much of the creative team (he’d come up in the theatre and was accustomed to working with a company). The script was co-written by Brian Yuzna and Dennis Paoli, who had also co-written Re-Animator, as well as having worked before with Gordon at the Organic Theatre in Chicago. Gordon would go on to do three more Lovecraft films with Paoli: Castle Freak (1995) (arguably at least, inspired by “The Outsider” and again working with Crampton and Combs), Dagon (2001), and Dreams in the Witch House (2005) (for the TV series, Masters of Horror). While I haven’t seen ‘Witch House,’ the others are really enjoyable. But, I’ve gotta say, for my money, From Beyond is my favorite of his Lovecraft adaptations, hands down. In a few ways, it is just more “Lovecraftian.” Some of that is obvious – it’s a story of otherworldly creatures beyond our comprehension that breach reality and drive people mad. They’re squiggly and goopy. There are tentacles involved. It all fits a common perception of what Lovecraft’s work consisted of. But I think it goes much deeper than that. So first, a bit of a digression re: Lovecraft.

On Lovecraft

The work of H.P. Lovecraft is a peculiar case. I can only speak for my own experience, but I imagine it may not be all that dissimilar from others’. I really like his oeuvre, but I can’t praise all aspects of it. Even overlooking the disturbingly blatant xenophobia and racism (a negative trait which he was not alone in having – if you ever pick up Bram Stoker’s “Lair of the White Worm,” for instance, be prepared), I sometimes feel like he didn’t actually write stories. I mean, he did write. A lot. Probably more than 100 tales were published. But they don’t always feel like stories in the classic sense. He didn’t seem particularly interested in character, and protagonists seemed to rarely have much, if any, agency over the events that would play out (thematically appropriate for him, but not always dramatically satisfying). Rather, the recurring narrative would be that of a witness. Some “normal guy,” who sometimes knew enough about the odd things that went bump in the night to sensibly try to steer clear of them, would be thrust into a situation wherein he would discover/observe/experience some shuddering horror beyond that which could be understood by his meager human intelligence. It would shake him to the core, but by the end, he would generally get away, such that he could tell the terrible tale, and through this unlucky narrator, H.P. could lay out some horrifying concept he’d dreamed up.

So with character and plot so decentered, I think the primary appeal of his work exists in two complementary qualities: theme and style. When I first encountered his texts, it was as if he had managed to exactly pin down just what this idea of ‘horror’ was that I’d become so enamored with: an encounter with that which is beyond what we can accept, what we can endure. He generally wrote in a sci-fi/weird fiction mode, creating (in many, though certainly not all) of his works, an extended mythos of all manner of wild, trans-dimensional, ancient beings, godlike to us petty humans, who do not really seek to harm us, so much as they just don’t care about us at all, and in going about their endless, unfathomable, arcane pursuits, just so happen to mortally, psychically, and spiritually threaten and/or destroy us in the process. We inhabit a world far larger, darker, and more terrifying than we can imagine, suffused with alien threat (paralleling his own xenophobia) and if we could see reality as it actually is, our feeble minds and souls couldn’t hope to endure. The thing is, for me, I don’t think this “cosmic horror” of his needs “cosmic” elements, per se. Rather, he paints pictures of encounters with things that shatter our previous conceptions of reality, of morality, of scale, and in so doing, can break us – and not all of them need include massive beings lying in slumber, waiting to awaken and devour the stars. I think this encounter, this revelation of unbearable reality is what “horror” is in life and having an author focus so specifically on setting it down on the page was exciting for me when I first discovered his writing many years ago. Also, the mythos itself is fun and odd and specific – it’s so refreshing to have something that plays the role of the demonic without having to buy into a Judeo-Christian mythology and ethical-moral hegemony.

Referenced below, ‘Under the Pyramids’ was also published as ‘Imprisoned with the Pharaohs,’ and credited to Harry Houdini in its first publication (it’s written first person from his perspective)

But the other thing he focuses on, and what really gives me pleasure in the reading, is his style. He is trying to do so much, to suggest things that test the limits of the imagination, and he will use every damn synonym in the thesaurus to do it. The phrase “over-the-top” cannot hope to capture his lexical abandon. An adherent of the school of thought that says what you can’t see is scarier than what you can, he wrote extensively of the narrator’s reactions, while painting around the edges of the thing itself, maintaining the implication that words couldn’t contain the truth of this horror. But, regardless,  along the way, he did use all the words. Hemmingway he is not. A favorite, thrillingly overwritten passage comes from his 1924 story, “Under the Pyramids,” in which Harry Houdini finds himself in Egypt, captured by sinister Bedouins (ah, the much mentioned xenophobia) and lowered by a rope into a hole in the ground, wherein he will discover ancient nefarious mummified beasties with crocodile and hippopotamus heads, carrying out their dark rites in worship of some eldritch, indescribable, god-like thing, rising into the chthonic darkness. But well before he gets to the horrific payoff, the process of being lowered under the earth just sings:

“Then the mental cataclysm came. It was horrible—hideous beyond all articulate description because it was all of the soul, with nothing of detail to describe. It was the ecstasy of nightmare and the summation of the fiendish. The suddenness of it was apocalyptic and daemoniac—one moment I was plunging agonisingly down that narrow well of million-toothed torture, yet the next moment I was soaring on bat-wings in the gulfs of hell; swinging free and swoopingly through illimitable miles of boundless, musty space; rising dizzily to measureless pinnacles of chilling ether, then diving gaspingly to sucking nadirs of ravenous, nauseous lower vacua. . . . Thank God for the mercy that shut out in oblivion those clawing Furies of consciousness which half unhinged my faculties, and tore Harpy-like at my spirit! That one respite, short as it was, gave me the strength and sanity to endure those still greater sublimations of cosmic panic that lurked and gibbered on the road ahead.”

I mean, yeah. That there is a good time! Is it good writing? I don’t know. Maybe? But also, maybe I don’t really care. When I can put myself in the mood for it, his prose is just such a blast. This is writing that is unashamed to go big, and while it is as over-the-top as can be, I don’t feel it ever ventures into a realm of campiness. It is a blast exactly because it is “too much,” but the whole point is to take that “too much” totally seriously – and be broken by it. It’s refreshing in our modern, jaded times to encounter anything so dialed up to eleven, while still being entirely earnest.

Written in 1920, ‘From Beyond’ wasn’t published until 1934, first in “The Fantasy Fan,” and then reprinted a few years later in “Weird Tales.”

So, with that, let’s actually come back to the film in question, which I think is an excellent adaptation of Lovecraft’s horror themes and exaggerated, but lovable style, while filling in some of the gaps his writing leaves open to make for a most satisfying viewing experience.

The Film

First off, the adaptation is, on one level, quite faithful. Most of what happens in the story makes it to the screen: in the text, the narrator goes to visit his friend and colleague, the scientist, Crawford Tillinghast who, in his attic laboratory, has created a sonic resonator that can tune the pineal gland to function as a kind of sense organ, perceiving layers of reality typically unnoticed. However when in the presence of the resonator, whatever lives in those other realms with which we are usually out of sync can perceive us as well – and attack. The mad doctor turns against our narrator, but when the police arrive in the end, Tillinghast is dead, our narrator has destroyed the machine, and he can go on, forever shaken by this encounter with that which came from beyond!

The film takes all of these details as a premise, as a starting point, but then it builds from there extensively. Now, Tillinghast (Combs) is actually the assistant to the mad (and we come to learn, also quite kinky) Doctor Pretorius (in a nod to Ernest Thesiger’s fabulously mad scientist in The Bride of Frankenstein). In a standout cold open, they get the resonator to work, discover the squiggly things beyond, and Tillinghast manages to escape with his life (though not his sanity), having destroyed the resonator, while his boss loses his head to something bigger, something worse.

Tillinghast is rescued from the psyche ward by Dr. McMichaels (Barbara Crampton), a psychiatrist who believes Pretorius’s machine could help schizophrenia patients, and has Tillinghast freed so that he can repair the resonator, enabling her to carry out her own experiments. Once operational, Pretorius returns, now one with the thing that had consumed him, mad with power and lust (the machine’s effect on the pineal gland results in a heightened state of arousal, even as goopy monsters abound), and mind shattering horror ensues.

Past that, I don’t really want to go too much into the plot (and there is a surprising amount of plot – twists and turns and reversals of alliance all over the place). Suffice it to say that Yuzna and Paoli run with the initial premise of Lovecraft’s text, do justice to it, and then add in an actual “story” on top, resulting in a really engaging, colorful, gory, inventive horror flick. Most of all, without ever undermining its own seriousness, it is fun and oh so “Lovecraftian.”

Firstly, beyond just faithfully following the concept of the text, it features wild special effects that live up to most expectations viewers would have of a “Lovecraft piece.” There are all manner of slimy, fleshy creatures that defy logic. The Pretorius-thing is in a state of constant flux, flesh distending and becoming other as it seeks to consume and absorb. Monstrous, cephalopodic tendrils undulate through the ether, wetly grasping at victims. There is an unearthly, pink-purple glow (truly high 80s) permeating the “science” of it all. And there are some jaw dropping moments of gore and weirdness: Tillinghast returning from the gullet of a transdimensional beast, bald and scarred, his pineal fully awakened and rising out of a newly formed orifice in his skull to lead him on a murderous brain-devouring, eye-sucking rampage; the Police sergeant accompanying the experiment to keep an eye on the mental patient (Ken Foree of Dawn of the Dead (1978) as well as countless others) being devoured by a swarm of insects from another dimension until he’s a quivering, meaty skeleton on the ground; and Pretorius eating Tillinghast whole, only for him to climb back up out of his mouth, beginning a goopy game of ‘whose body is this and whose hand is reaching out of whose chest?’ Fun stuff.

But in line with what I wrote above about Lovecraft’s prose, what really makes this feel so in the spirit of his writing is not the tentacles or the goopiness or the existence of horrors well beyond our ken. It is the style, and that best surfaces in the performances. Our three central characters are all obsessed and/or mad in one way or another, and their performances are so perfectly tuned – all achieving a heightened style without tipping over into self-parody. Ted Sorel’s Pretorius is sadistically menacing while also being quite playful and sardonic. He brings great intensity and focus to his madness – not ranting and raving, but deadly in his single-minded desire to consume physically, psychically, and sexually, anything or anyone he can lure into his orbit. Barbara Crampton’s Dr. McMichaels walks a fine line between personally motivated clinical interest and being wholly seduced by the power and allure of the machine, and her fluctuations between self-erasing compulsion and rational self-interest, between victimizing and being victimized are carried with a great deal of nuance. Both performers are excellent.

But the movie really belongs to Jeffrey Combs. While of course, I enjoyed him in Re-Animator (and also Bride of Re-Animator – but I never saw Beyond Re-Animator) as Herbert West, his performance here is just perfectly calibrated, threading the needle with exactly the right amounts of mania, terror, earnest feeling, and fragile humanity in the face of the unbearable, as well as periodically bringing a hint of humor which sells the horror without undercutting it, without diminishing its seriousness. When, after their first encounter with the newly, fleshily otherworldly Pretorius, in which Tillinghast just barely saves the sergeant from being devoured by turning off the machine at the last second, and he says simply, “that – will be quite enough of that,” Combs’s delivery elicits a genuine laugh from me every time – but this small comic moment works with the drama of it all, rather than detracting from it. Without jumping around a lot, he gives a rather physical performance, the play of different mental-emotional-spiritual tensions acting out in his body, his voice, his eyes, and breath. All three actors are on the same page with that Lovecraftian excess, but Combs absolutely shines, delivering moments that in their personal horror, are such a freaking delight. It is pitch perfect horror-melodrama (which really is harder than it sounds) and deeply satisfying.   

And there are some elements which don’t feel much like Lovecraft, but still bring something to the table. As mentioned, there can be occasional notes of comedy here and there. When it arises, though, it is just for a moment and doesn’t dominate the scene (a bit of a departure from the more blackly comic tone of Re-Animator) – still, old H.P. never really came across as a funny guy, so this is a change, but I think a welcome one.

But the most significant introduction is that of sex, something that Lovecraft didn’t generally touch on (if at all – I haven’t read his full catalogue, but I’d be genuinely surprised). The film adds the conceit that the pineal gland is responsible for regulating the sex drive (which, from a quick skim of the Wikipedia page, I don’t believe is true), and thus, when the resonator stimulates the pineal, allowing the veil to be lifted between worlds, the air is filled with a sexual charge. Furthermore, those who succumb to the call of the machine do so out of a kind of sexual obsession, an utterly non-cerebral, even physical drive – a hunger they can’t fully understand or resist – to see, to know, to experience – to possess. This can lead them to monstrous actions in pursuit of their new sensory addiction, and also result in their own violation (a warning, if sexual assault is something that will just ruin a movie for you, as in Re-Animator, in one scene, Barbara Crampton’s character is subjected to unwelcome, sexualized contact – before a giant, slimy, mandibled  thing tries to eat her head).

In a way, to connect to a different author, it made me think much more of Clive Barker than Lovecraft – the mutable body, blurred lines between minds and flesh and sexual need – desire and pain and compulsion all tied up in knots with some unknown quality of the spirit. The addition of sex takes the experience beyond the realm of the merely cerebral – the horrors now existing in an interpersonal space, between bodies and minds, just as it also invites creatures that tread between worlds. Unfortunately, this sexual element didn’t always land for me on first viewing (and I found myself thinking how amazing it would have been if Barker had somehow been brought onto the project to help develop it – but I’m pretty sure he was developing Hellraiser (1987) at the time) – sometimes it felt tacked on and underdeveloped – an excuse to include some ticket-selling titillation and put Crampton in leather gear, though having watched the film a few times in the last couple of weeks, I can now better see its integration through the whole film. Still, even if I think it could have been explored more deeply, it certainly augments the piece.

So that is From Beyond. If you are in the mood for something that goes big, that takes itself seriously while still having just a bit of room for humor, that has crazy physical effect work, that captures a truly “Lovecraftian” style of madness, of excess, of Horror (all on a tidy little budget at Charles Band’s Empire Entertainment in Rome), this is your movie. It sure made my day, and might currently be my favorite Lovecraft adaptation.

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A quick non-Lovecraftian aside – if you are a regular reader, I am sorry it’s been a couple of weeks longer than usual. Life got in the way. It’s even kinda funny. After watching this the first time, I thought, “Wow! Fantastic! Loved it! Let’s get a quick post up about that and not overthink things!” And then more time went by than ever before actually publishing. I’ve been preparing a performance for the cabaret I work with (among other things, finally making that “Youth Runs Wild!” 50s teensploitation act I wrote about months ago) and there has been a great deal of arts and crafts to do in order to build everything. Along the way, I have put this movie on in the background so many times while sewing or hot gluing or painting, keeping it fresh in my mind and always thinking, “Today will be the day I write!” though it’s been weeks since that initial hot Saturday on which I first watched it. Argh. I try to get a post up bi-monthly, but that’s not always feasible. Anyway, I have high hopes for what’s coming next – thanks for sticking around…

The Shining Compared – Book and Film

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It’s odd that two works you love can be thrust into conflict with each other. But hey, that’s a lot of the discourse that circulates online – fans of one film feel compelled to oppose those of another; liking or disliking a work of fiction mysteriously causing people to hate you to the core of their beings – and for some stupid reason, we all feel compelled to have an opinion about everything (I write on my blog). We live in strange times. Usually, I find these conflicts fruitless and frustrating (as I’ve written about before), but every once in a blue moon, there is an interesting discussion to be had. Case in point – Stephen King reportedly hated The Shining – not his own book, of course, but Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation thereof. In a clash of two creators, both of whom have put out really valuable work (both these two pieces and in their careers writ large), I think it’s fascinating to look at the differences of approach and see where each is coming from – to look at both pieces on their own terms, appreciating what they each offer, while still considering how and why they differ.

And so that’s what we’re going to do today – look at King’s 1977 novel and Kubrick’s 1980 film. Both are, in my opinion, great works of horror, and they share many surface similarities of plot, location, and character, but in some ways they couldn’t be more different. There are many reasons for this, but the claim I’d like to make is that their essential difference is in the point of reader/viewer identification – though both works shift viewpoint between Jack, Wendy, Danny, and Dick, I think Jack is the main lens through which one views the book, while his son, Danny, serves this function for the film, and this makes an essential difference.

The Novel – The Shining (1977)

It came first, so we’ll start with the book. Jack and Wendy Torrance have relocated to Colorado with Danny, their young son, after Jack lost his teaching job back east for assaulting a student. In flashbacks, we learn of Jack’s longstanding problems with drinking and anger management, but also about the physical abuse he suffered at the hands of his alcoholic father, as well as the emotional abuse Wendy received from her mother. Spending time behind both of their eyes, we feel how scared, and how conflicted, both of them are about the potential danger Jack poses to his wife and son, how neither wants to become their respective, problematic parent. At the start of the story, Jack’s been dry for a while (after drunkenly breaking Danny’s arm in a moment of impatience), and he is doing his best to hold it together, repair their relationships, and rebuild trust with Wendy and Danny. It is obvious that he does love them and lives in fear of failing and/or hurting them, but the anger and the resentment is still always there, roiling under the surface. Having shown some promise as a young author, he is trying to finish a play which is inspired by his experiences as a teacher, but is having trouble sorting it out, haunted by the insecurity that he may not be able to fulfill his early literary promise.

And then there is Danny – a very aware, very mature young child, who also happens to have psychic abilities – sometimes privy to knowledge he shouldn’t have, catching echoes of the future or the past, reading thoughts, or just knowing things. He loves his parents, but he also sees them more clearly than they would probably like – aware of when his father is thinking about “the bad thing” (drinking), knowing when his mother is scared or angry at Jack. These abilities warn him not to go when his parents plan to spend a winter taking care of The Overlook Hotel – a beautiful remote mountain resort, but sadly that’s not his choice to make. Of course, the hotel is haunted. Or if not haunted exactly, it is clearly a very bad place – malicious and aware, filled with the residual traces of countless murders and crimes that have taken place there, hungry to consume this young family, particularly Danny, who with his power, would make a real tasty morsel.

Thus, the lion share of the story consists of Jack being seduced by the hotel, plied with drink (which doesn’t really exist – but is no less addictive), and most importantly given his insecurities, a sense of belonging and importance – he could be “management material” – in order to turn against his wife and son and ultimately kill them, feeding the bad place, as we know a previous caretaker had done to his wife and daughters some years back.

Along the way, there’s a bunch of genuinely scary stuff. As with an early scene in It, King captures that sense of having to go down into the dark basement to get some batteries, only to scare the hell out of yourself for no reason and go running back up the stairs to the relative safety of the afternoon light. You know there was nothing down there, and you feel silly, but that makes it no less terrifying. There’s an awful scene with a wasp nest (I’m allergic so yikes!), topiary animals and fire hoses seem to spring to malicious life, a creeping unseen presence hunts after Danny in the playground, and a dead woman comes for both him and his father in the iconic Room 217.

But while we spend a great deal of time with both Danny and Wendy (not to mention Dick Hallorann, the cook who shares a sliver of Danny’s abilities and makes a heroic journey to come save the day), this is clearly Jack’s book through and through. It is his emotional struggle with his own past, with his experience of idolizing and fearing his own alcoholic father, of pitying and despising his also abused mother who failed to protect him, of struggling with his own resentment, his own self-doubt, his compulsion to dull his fears and frustrations with anything that will do the job.

He is seduced by the hotel – it plays at respecting him, at being the good bartender – listening without judgement as he voices his hidden frustration and anger towards his family. The hotel will give him what he wants – even offering up its own deeply sordid history as a fascinating new writing project which could bring him the literary acclaim he so craves – respect to prove that he is not just a flash in the pan drunk, now doomed to menial labor and a lifetime of growing smaller. It will also serve him all the martinis he likes, loosening his tongue, wearing down what resistance he still has until he’s finally willing to act on his darkest, most shameful impulses and serve his family up to the hotel’s gaping maw.

King in ’77

While material with the other characters is enjoyable and effective, it is the time we spend with Jack that feels most personal and emotionally grounded. Maybe this is a bit of projection, knowing something of King’s biography, but it really doesn’t feel like a stretch to suppose that this author, writing his third novel after some early success and still feeling a need to prove himself, who has said that around this time, he’d been drinking a case of beer a day and worried about the welfare of his wife and son, might have identified most strongly with the character of Jack – investing more of himself in his struggles and crafting a story that in addition to being scary, is ultimately a terrifying and moving tragedy – the story of Jack failing, giving into his worst self – and doing what he always feared he might – becoming his own father, and much worse. It feels deeply autobiographical – it feels meaningful. It feels. It is a book with feeling, about a father who loves his family but still tries to destroy them.

The Film – The Shining (1980)

Stanley Kubrick’s film is very simply, a totally different beast. Whereas the book is warm and emotional, the film is icy cold and alienating. Whereas the book serves up scary sequences in a traditional horror sense, the film removes almost all of them and really doesn’t look or feel like any kind of standard ‘haunted house’ flick. And whereas the book delivers emotional and psychological horror in addition to its scares, the film elides psychology, back story, and much of the context, resulting in a masterpiece of atmospheric horror in an almost Lovecraftian “cosmic” sense – there is an overwhelming impression of sanity-rending wrongness – both weirdly fascinating (like some dangerous, beautiful insect) and deeply unsettling.

So let’s look at King’s criticisms: “The movie has no heart; there’s no center to the picture,” he said. “I wrote the book as a tragedy, and if it was a tragedy, it was because all the people loved each other … here, it seems there’s no tragedy because there’s nothing to be lost.” As best as I can tell, this is the essence of his objections – he wrote a book that was all heart – and that heart was his, bared, fully rooted in his own personal fears, experiences, and doubts. We spend time behind the eyes, with the thoughts and intentions, of all of his characters. We know what Wendy is thinking – her calculations as she decides whether or not to stick it out with the potentially dangerous man that she loves. We see Danny’s view of his parents and even in the final moments, he and his father are allowed one loving interaction before it all comes crashing down. I can sympathize with King taking personally Kubrick’s excision of this deeply personal, heartfelt material (but to be fair, I also remember reading King propagating the old chestnut of writerly advice – “you have to murder your darlings” – but I guess it really chafes when someone else does it).

Kubrick’s film comes from a different, much colder, more inhuman space. The stunning opening helicopter shots, as the credits role, show Jack’s VW as a miniscule, insignificant object, utterly dwarfed by the surrounding mountainous landscapes, and this sense of scale, of human smallness and powerless carries through the film. Once odd, menacing things start happening at the hotel, we have no context for them – neither we nor the Torrences understand what is going on or why. Compare this with the book where between Jack’s research into the hotel’s history and the stories Dick Halloran tells Danny, we get a sense of the historical episode that is recurring whenever a character experiences something weird. The film gives up none of that, keeping many of those details but explaining none of them and thus crafting an overwhelming experience of the uncanny (which I’ve heard in German translates roughly as “un-homely” which I think is fitting – the hotel is a house – in every way it looks like a place to live and be comfortable, but it is not a “home”). Everything is somehow alien; things seeming more or less ‘normal’ but are clearly not, and the what, how, and why of it all are forever beyond our meager human capacity for comprehension.

In the book, Dick Halloran makes his long, heroic journey and really helps save Wendy and Danny. In the film, like some dark cosmic joke, he makes the same heroic journey only to find himself on the end of Jack’s axe within moments of entering the hotel. The universe does not love us and nothing and nobody is coming to help – we are on our own and it’s only getting colder.

King fairly complained that the characters lack an arc, but that is natural in something so unconcerned with character – and does every film need to be? They do have an experience, and it is an enveloping and disturbing one that we share with them, but it is more like an encounter with nature – or something beyond nature: cold, hostile, unapproachable, and cruel – than it is like a ‘story’ in a traditional sense.

Reportedly King also hated Jack Nicholson’s performance: “When we first see Jack Nicholson, he’s in the office of Mr. Ullman, the manager of the hotel, and you know, then, he’s crazy as a shit house rat. All he does is get crazier.” And he’s not really wrong, but I feel this is a choice rather than a failing (Kubrick was famously obsessive about every little detail in his films – it’s hard to imagine anything being an accident). And this brings me back to my main theory of where the works diverge. If Jack is the key to the novel, Danny is the key to the film.

Danny is a very young child, maybe 4 years old, growing up in the shadow of an alcoholic, rage filled, deeply resentful father, basically just a sad loser and angry about it. (Has this version of Jack ever actually written anything (we never hear about it)? Will he? Why did he lose his teaching job? Could he recover any sense of self or is he doomed to be a small, violent man forever blaming the world, and especially his family, for his own failings?) Danny’s father has hurt him at least once and very easily could again. Danny’s browbeaten mother has not been physically abused yet as far as we know, but has obviously suffered emotional trauma in this relationship, and while she does her best to protect Danny, she’s already been reduced to such a state that she is generally ineffectual in this regard (though I must disagree with King that she is misogynistically presented as weak – in fact, I’d say she does the most – The book’s Wendy was pretty tough from the beginning, but seeing Shelly Duvall’s mousy Wendy grow from this small, broken, nervous woman into someone who fights back is, for me, more moving – and  her newfound strength is all the more inspiring for how hard it is for her to claim – also, she’s been doing Jack’s damn job the whole time while he sits around going crazy – she is more than she seems).

Especially with his psychically heightened sensitivity, Danny witnesses so much more than he is ready for – and while the book makes this kind of intellectual (hearing verbal thoughts, understanding things he shouldn’t be able to understand), the film doesn’t give us such details, and we can only assume a more emotional, spiritually impressionistic experience, leading at one point to a kind of self-defense catatonia. In fact, his awareness of the emotional threat in his family unit, without being able to really understand it, is a fair parallel for our uncanny experience of the film as a whole.

Danny loves his father, but lives in terror of this mercurial, angry, sad man – and while he sees and hears and feels so much more than he should ever have to, he doesn’t understand what he’s experiencing or why his father is so angry, so dangerous. And that is the film in a nutshell – we get the generalized terror but we don’t get the understanding. We see Jack as Danny sees him – a mystery, a sword hanging by a thread ready to snap at any moment. He isn’t the sympathetic tragic figure of the novel, but rather a force of threatening nature that can’t really be communicated with – that can perhaps be escaped, but which can never really be placated. Jack is basically crazy from the beginning, but he hasn’t quite broken yet and the bad vibes of the bad place of the Overlook Hotel, along with simply being locked in with the wife and child he so resents just pushes him over the edge to which he’d already been dangerously close.

Our experience of the film as a whole parallels Danny’s relationship with his dad – we can’t really understand what is going on, but while we are drawn to keep watching, the film itself looks back at us with a sense of cold menace, as if, like Jack, like the hotel, it sees us as small irritants to crush. It is, from the first frame, a beautiful, fascinating film that you don’t want to look away from – just as Danny does love his father and wants to be close to him, to be loved by him – but both the film and the father represent truly ineffable threats. We are enraptured, but never shake the feeling of being cruelly appraised by the object of our fascination. It is all beautiful, but we are lost in its maze (like the hedge maze that doesn’t even feature in the book), just as Danny is engulfed by the hypnotic carpet.

King’s Shining is a moving, tragic, terrifying horror story about a family in what is essentially a haunted house. Kubrick’s is a unique film, so unlike most horror cinema (or any other genre as well) with its singular style and cinematic vocabulary, and yet truly horrific in a cold, Lovecraftian way, and like in Lovecraft’s writing, there is little character or narrative really. When thinking of my favorite horror films, this doesn’t always make the list, and yet every time I sit down to watch it, it blows me away again, beguiling me, enfolding me in its icy inhumanity, baffling me with things I’m not meant to understand, but which, for all that, never feel arbitrary – everything resonates, feeling horrifically real, but just beyond my ability to wrap my head around.

King wrote an excellent, scary, sad horror novel and Kubrick made an amazing, truly horrific horror film. And they could not be more different. I understand why King hated the adaptation – I can see how he could take it personally, but I think this is a case where outside of his personal, well-justified reaction, we need not choose sides, setting our house against itself – life is hard enough as it is. I’m glad to have them both. I’m grateful to both artists for their contributions. I hope that’s ok with you…

Re-donning the Slasher Goggles: Don’t Fear the Reaper

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So this post is going up a little late. As I’ve much written about, it can be hard to choose my topic each week and this last one was no exception. I watched one early 80s folk horror about which I’d heard really good things, and while I appreciated aspects of its concept and enjoyed its madcap weirdness, certain weaknesses of its execution kept me at arm’s length and I just couldn’t get into it. I watched an absolutely gorgeous arthouse horror from a filmmaker I’d long had a blind spot for, but I need to rewatch it to order my thoughts before writing and while I loved it on initial viewing, watching it again immediately just felt a bit like homework (but I’ll do it soon – I promise). I even made it out to the cinema and saw Cocaine Bear, which I rather enjoyed, but don’t have sufficient thoughts about to fill a whole post.

Past that, I’ve been doing a bit of travel around Croatia, where I’m currently “workationing” (hooray for remote work), and that means lots of time sitting at cafes reading, and in the last couple of days, I burned through the end of a book and having enjoyed it so much, found myself going back to the beginning and almost re-reading the whole thing the next day. So let’s talk about that. Let’s return to Proofrock, Idaho for the second installment of Stephen Graham Jones’s “Lake Witch Trilogy,” Don’t Fear the Reaper.

Don’t Fear the Reaper (2023)

I think I’m going to have to do this in two parts. To do the book justice, it’s necessary to get into certain details which could rather spoil its reading. But at the same time, I really liked it and would like to offer some explication of its value to potential readers. Therefore, I will go into it first sans spoilers. And then, after a break, will discuss key elements and later revelations for a select readership that has already finished the book.

Last summer, during a few weeks of discussing the concept and some stand out examples of “the final girl,” I devoted a post to the first book of this cycle, My Heart is a Chainsaw. At the time, I had no idea that it was even part of a trilogy, so satisfyingly did it reach its conclusion (and from an interview I heard, I have the impression that it was written as a stand-alone piece, which the author later decided to return to and build on). When I heard this volume was coming out, I was even initially hesitant, feeling that the original hadn’t needed continuation (a sentiment that often arises when it comes to Slasher franchises), but I’m so glad I picked this up.  Graham Jones manages to really deepen and expand upon themes of the first work, very satisfyingly allowing characters to grow and mature, while also exploring how the effects of the first novel ripple through this town and the lives of its citizens, surfacing in a new explosion of violence.

And on top of that, the book just feels like a sprint. Whereas Chainsaw took its time, getting us behind the eyes of Jade, its narrator and eventual final girl, navigating us through a rich collection of characters and contexts that all set up possible causes of and motives for the deaths that were occurring, interspersed with her pontifications on Slasher theory, the lens through which she viewed her world, before Jade had to finally rise to the occasion, stepping into the shoes of the idealized role she’d never thought herself qualified for in a final act blood bath, Reaper just hits the ground running and doesn’t let up till it gets where it’s going. Full of intense, cinematic sequences, it is a page turner, as they say – an exciting, often gory, emotional roller coaster that left me pumping my fist in the air following its triumphant last sentence. In the lead up to releasing Reaper, I started seeing t-shirts with the slogan “Jade Daniels is my final girl” popping up on social media – for good reason. She’s an easy character to rally around.

Official shirts available here.

In many ways, this functions as a Slasher sequel, and it’s a good one. As Randy enthuses in Scream 2, there’s a bigger body count and it’s gorier with more elaborate death scenes. But in other ways, it gives space to elements that wouldn’t ordinarily be focused on (not to mention hosting characters with a degree of self-aware genre knowledge that puts poor Randy to shame). Four years have passed since the events of the first book and their weight hangs heavily on all those who survived. The town has generally recovered since the Lake Witch slayings and subsequent fire and flood, but beneath the surface, the town of Proofrock is haunted by those who were lost, by the horrors the survivors witnessed, by wounds that linger, both physical and otherwise. Into this space, Jade returns, having been subjected to a lengthy trial following her heroic and cathartic turn in the climax of the first book. No good deed goes unpunished.

Notably, Graham Jones has allowed her to change, to grow up a bit. Throughout the first volume, she sees everything through her “Slasher-goggles,” having embraced slasher films and tropes as a kind of coping mechanism to deal with a slate of traumatic experiences she’d been subjected to. In seeing things through as she does in the first book, she is allowed some personal resolution – some things are laid to rest, or at least are contained at the bottom of the lake. Though it is so unfair that she alone was prosecuted (unsuccessfully) for her actions, the fact that the trial took her out of her once toxic context seems to have been good for her. She is in a more stable place. She doesn’t need to lean on the mythic resonance of her favorite films as she once had.

Ironically though, other characters have now done their homework, having lived through their own real life slasher film, and Jade (or Jennifer as she would now rather be called) is no longer the only one so versed in the lore of the sub-genre. In fact, she would rather not dwell on the material she once depended on, and resists others’ attempts to make her view new events through her old lens. Fascinatingly, these others each have a different relationship to the material. For one, it is research for survival – determined to endure whatever is thrown at her, she has obsessively worked through every slasher and tawdry thriller she can find. Another seems to have shared a similar history with Jade, living through childhood trauma and mythologizing the figures of slasher cinema, but whereas Jade was destined for the heroic, he has become a sleazy predator. Finally, a third character seems to have studied these filmic texts as models for their own cycle of murders – the movies, as Billy Loomis once said, not making psychos, but making psychos “more creative.”

Into the mix as well, comes the nigh-mythic serial killer, Dark Mill South, a hulking silent butcher right out of a later installment of Friday the 13th, Halloween, or Hatchet. He is an intimidating figure and the scenes in which Jade confronts him are some of the most gripping in the book. Also, just as her Native American (Blackfeet) heritage has done so much to shape (and sour) her relationship with her community and family, his has also contributed to the shadow he casts, particularly the implication that his many, varied, horrific killings are all to be taken as vengeance for the mass hanging in 1862 of 38 Sioux warriors, ordered by Lincoln. Dark Mill South is clearly a monster – he has done horrific things (and the time we spend inside his perspective does nothing to soften that view), but the sense that he could be enacting a kind of vengeance for such a violence of the past, that his crimes are in fact a form of justice, as brutal and implacable as an act of nature, helps contextualize him as a Slasher killer in a classic-mythic sense.

Thus, though she has successfully moved on in a number of ways, when high school kids start showing up dead all over town, just as she’s getting home, Jade is pulled back in, and will once again have to wade through a river of gore to protect those she cares about. But that is one thing that’s different this time. Four years earlier, she’d been so isolated, the weird horror kid from a “bad family” crying “slasher” to deaf ears, her relationships mostly antagonistic. This time, she does have a small community around her. Most of the town still may view her with suspicion at best, but she is now tied to some other survivors of the last massacre. She actually has a couple of friends and loved ones who she does not want to lose, for whom she will fight.

And perhaps at this point, before we get into any discussion of later developments, it’s a good time to stop if you haven’t read the book and think you might at all like to. If so, do start with My Heart is a Chainsaw. Enjoy.

This is Graham Jones – horror folk always seem so nice.

Ok, I’ll assume if you’re still here, you’ve either read both Chainsaw and Reaper or never will. So now I’m just going to geek out a bit. One thing I really appreciated was how in her roaring death cry to pierce Dark Mill South and “find the off switch,” I flashed on the mama bear at the end of the first book. Jade spent her young life failed by her family (and worse), but in this moment, she can do for her chosen family what wasn’t done for her. It’s a lovely moment. As is the denouement regarding Sheriff Hardy and Melanie. If only that meant the actual killer had been brought down.

In the first book, there is much discussion of red herrings in the Slasher genre, particularly in those that revolve around the mystery of the killer’s identity (which I’d hazard to say is actually most of them – the silent, named, masked killers cast a long shadow, but far more are unseen murderers waiting for a final act reveal).  The first time around, Jade, through her goggles, was endlessly trying to figure out what was going on. Theory after theory fell flat though because life isn’t a clean story and, well, there were actually a few killers to reckon with (in both cases, these elements are repeated). This time, even though clues are littered throughout the book, and Jade and Letha even have an extended discussion about “final girls who are actually the killer,” it’s still so easy to get distracted by the looming figure of Dark Mill South, who does, in fact, finish some kids off, but otherwise is a minor contributor to the mayhem, a convenient cover story who just happened to be brought in by the storm at just the right time. This misdirection begins before the story does, with the quote from Carol J. Clover about how the killer is invariably male.

In contrast, in both the Melanie/Spirit Elk and the Cinnamon/Ginger (or was it always only Cinnamon?) storylines, the past is coming to bear and revenge is being dealt, whether for complicity in one death many years ago (classic slasher stuff) or rooted in a twisted sense of balancing the scales following the last slaughter and a misplaced blame for the one person who actually managed to stop it last time. And while Dark Mill South is in the ground and Hardy and Melanie are reunited beneath the ice, Cinnamon is still out there, free and unaccused. It leaves things intriguingly open for the final volume. While at the end of the first book, I felt everything had been quite wrapped up, this time, I am rather waiting for the final installment, and wondering what new repercussions will follow from this one. Also – how much of a time jump will there be this time? It seems unlikely that Jade will avoid at least some length of a prison sentence.

I loved this book for many of the same reasons that I so enjoyed the first. It is both a successful, interesting, fun thriller, and at the same time, such a love letter to a much maligned genre that so many of us take so much pleasure and find such deep satisfaction in. I love how through Jade, and now also through Letha, Armitage, and Cinnamon, these “dead teenager pictures,” are revealed as emotional texts, as therapeutic, as inspiring, as art, as important. How many movies have shown some variant of sportsball as a metaphor for life, as a vehicle for a mythic hero’s journey, as the crucible in which identity is formed? We all find meaning where we do, and in finding it, create it.

And that is what we have here. It is so satisfying seeing a character like Jade, who has latched onto these works of fiction (which the general public and ‘reputable critics’ would scorn) for survival, go through so much, suffer but still be compelled to investigate, fight but also be driven to understand, and ultimately grow into a powerful woman who can and will do what is necessary, whether that means killing the killer with an appropriately phallic weapon, helping a loved one find peace, or taking the fall for a friend. It’s moving to go on the journey with her, to witness her becoming.

It’s also really fun.

Final Girls Books – The Final Chapter

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I feel that in the last few years, the trope of the “Final Girl” has really been having a moment. Of course, the character has been around since at least the mid-70s, and has been very present in horror cinema ever since, but lately, there’ve been a lot of works which really use her name, or which are directly about the idea of the character. Behind the Mask (2006), The Cabin in the Woods (2011), Final Girl (2015), and The Final Girls (2015) all revolve around positioning the main character to explicitly take on the role (even if not all of them use the term). Recent spins on the Slasher formula have played with the role, with Happy Death Day (2017) starting with a ‘mean girl’ caught in a Slasher time loop who must be all of the other victims before she can finally grow as a person to become the final girl, defeat the killer, and leave the loop, and Freaky (2020) doing a body swap with the final girl and the slasher-killer (the original title being “Freaky Friday the 13th), such that her experience of both inhabiting this strong, violent male body and observing the killer in her own is instructive, helping her, once more in her own skin, find the chutzpah to finish him off. Furthermore, “legacy sequels” such as Halloween (2018), Scream (2022), or Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) all circle back to their original final girl (though Sydney was never absent from her franchise and Laurie did this before in Halloween: H20), picking up with her many years later to see how the trauma she endured has affected her life, shaped her character, before thrusting her back onto the killing floor.

And this final girl renaissance hasn’t only been on screen. In 2017, Riley Sager published his thriller, Final Girls (which I’ve not yet read), and in 2021, two authors who I have previously written about here (Grady Hendrix and Stephen Graham Jones), both published Final Girl themed books: Hendrix’s The Final Girl Support Group and Graham Jones’s My Heart is a Chainsaw. Both of them are about characters who are not only final girls, but for whom the concept of the “Final Girl” is a significant, psychologically organizing principle, a mirror which they hold themselves up to and in which they find themselves lacking, but it’s a role they are thrust into nevertheless.

I’ve been wanting to write about both and since I’ve been on a final girl kick these last few weeks (see here and here, and also check out my guest spot on a podcast here, discussing the 2015 The Final Girls), I thought this was a good time to reread both novels and share some thoughts on them. I’ll endeavor to avoid spoilers in this discussion, so these might be shorter reviews, but I really recommend both books very highly.

The Final Girl Support Group (2021)

In his very entertaining, thrilling, and sometimes quite touching novel, Hendrix posits a world where the slasher killings of 80s films all actually happened (before then being made into films), and in which the young women who had survived these massacres later came together in group therapy, periodically meeting through the decades, to help one another continue to live, carrying the weight of what had happened to them, of what they’d had to do to survive. The main character, Lynnette Tarkington (based on Linnea Quigley’s character from Silent Night, Deadly Night who gets impaled, topless, on deer antlers), a core member of the group, has always felt distanced. She survived a massacre, but she wasn’t really a “final girl,” so much as a victim left for dead, who didn’t die. She never killed her killer, but she has been shaped by the nightmare that she lived through just as the “actual” final girls in the group have (each of whom is modeled on a classic final girl and generally has a name implying the actress who played her).

Thirty years later, she lives an isolated life, focused solely on survival: her apartment is a fortress, she has trained endlessly in self-defense, she is always armed, and she follows compulsive routines to ensure that no one can ever follow her home to her sanctuary. The only regular contact she has with others is with her plant and the group and so, when it seems that some person or group is targeting final girls, her carefully maintained world starts to collapse. At first, no one believes her as she starts to see the signs of a coordinated attack upon her ranks – all of the members of her group have their psychological quirks and she is no exception, coming off as an over-reacting survivalist-conspiracy theorist, and she is on her own to uncover what is happening and why, and to somehow stop it.

The book is just a treat – a quick, exciting read, full of twists and turns and endless references and Easter eggs to tickle a horror fan (just tracing the names and influences of the different characters is fun), but also, as is generally true for Hendrix, there is real emotional depth. Lynnette is an interesting character to follow – we don’t know (and neither, really, does she) how much her perceptions reflect reality and how much they are the paranoid fantasies of someone who lived through hell and has been forever scarred by the experience. The mystery is engaging, some sequences of threat or violence have an edge of horror, and there’s plenty of comic life to the proceedings, but at the end of the day, the heart of the book is the resilience of this woman who has suffered so much and keeps going, the friendships (however strained) between these women who have shared such terrors, and the way a role, a concept can haunt a person, shape a person, make demands on a person. All the women of the story carry a complex relationship with the idea of being “a final girl,” though we most experience Lynnette’s – and this exploration of the tensions between the ideal and reality, between being a free person with her own agency and being a figure in a set, self-perpetuating narrative, between the isolating impulse to survive and the responsibilities we take on for those we open ourselves to is what it is really about. And it is a rich theme to delve into.

Beyond that, Hendrix just makes fun books. Each chapter title is another horror sequel reference. Between each chapter, there is always an interstitial text – some document from the world of the characters – a letter, a newspaper clipping, text from a card left at a memorial for victims of a massacre – it all makes the novel an interesting space to inhabit. Sometimes these documents offer clues to what is actually happening, but often they simply give the world heightened specificity, offering intriguing glimpses into the lived-in space of the various characters. All in all, it is a compulsive, rewarding read, and I will continue to pick up whatever Hendrix puts out.

My Heart is a Chainsaw (2021)

Stephen Graham Jones offers a main character with a very different background, but one whose sense of self is just as tied up in the concept of the “Final Girl.” Jade is a Blackfeet high school senior in Proofrock, a small Idaho town on Indian Lake. Ostracized from her peers, and with a troubled home life, she is an intense, encyclopedic horror fan, particularly into Slashers, in which she finds the comfort of a familiar formula, the mythic resonance of ritual played out again and again, the vicarious power trip of the faceless killer, safe behind a mask, and the inspiration of the willful, transformed, victorious final girl. But for reasons which eventually become clear (which are at the heart of her troubled character), while she dreams of living out the fantasy of the slasher narrative, she never sees herself as a candidate for filling that beloved role.

And so, when she starts to see the signs of a slasher cycle beginning in her small lakeside town, she starts casting about to find one who could, and finds her in Letha Mondragon, a new girl who has joined her graduating class shortly before the end of the year. Letha’s just moved to town as her father is a member of a coterie of wealthy types moving in and developing the former National Park land across the lake, and in Jade’s eyes, she’s perfect: athletic, beautiful, serious, investigative, and most of all, pure – she is everything Jade feels she is not, and so she takes it upon herself to introduce Letha to the ways of the slasher film, hoping to prepare her to rise to the challenge when her time inevitably comes. Of course, everyone thinks she’s crazy.

Thus, Jade is generally on her own, and often in trouble with her parents, her school, her job, and the law as she investigates the series of strange deaths which are plaguing her town, all the while trying to convince Letha of the role she has to play, blind to how she is growing into it herself, incapable of seeing her own strength, her own resolve, convinced that because of who and what she is, because of what she has lived, she could not be more than an observer, an early victim, at best a “Randy” (who in Scream tells the others the ‘rules’ of surviving a horror film). She is a fan – not a hero.

Without going into any details, as this book is full of them, and there are loads of false starts and red herrings along the way before arriving at an incredibly brutal explosion of strange and vengeful violence, I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say that in climbing through the blood and gristle of this sometimes gory tale, Jade is thrust into a confrontation with her own story, her own past, her own identity, both changed by the process and becoming more truly herself.

This emotional arc weaves through a sometimes twisty narrative where we are never sure what is really happening. There are so many possible clues, and Jade’s many working theories and assumptions are often mistaken. All of this serves to deliver a fun mystery to unravel, both of who is killing all these people, in these very varied ways, and what Jade’s deal is under her tough horror-kid façade. It pays off both in excitement and mystery, deeply felt rage and vengeance, and ultimately a kind of promise of a life Jade hasn’t known. It’s a ride.

What a Coincidence

The two books share some core structural elements. Both feature a central character who everyone discounts, a Cassandra who alone sees a rising threat, both of whom compare themselves unfavorably with the ideal of the ‘Final Girl,’ and yet are sustained on the concept of the indomitable survivor who, as Graham Jones writes, “is finally turning around to fight, is insisting on her own life, is refusing to die, isn’t going to take even one more moment of abuse.” Both books name each chapter with a reference to some Slasher film. And both include additional texts between the chapters, My Heart is a Chainsaw presenting a series of extra-credit papers that Jade wrote for her very patient history teacher over the years in which she expounds on Slasher film history, tropes, themes, and analysis. On one level, these are often fun love letters to the genre, but Graham Jones also weaves through them significant insights into Jade’s character (one of these becomes a significant plot point when these collected texts are given to Letha, intended as a kind of textbook to prepare her for the coming storm).

What is it in the zeitgeist that led both of these authors, contemporaries in current horror fiction, to engage with these particular themes at exactly this time? Though the stories are quite different, the parallels in what both texts circle around are striking. In both cases, we deal not only with this particular horror film trope, but with what it means to survive a kind of trauma, and how a person can define themselves in terms of, or in opposition to that experience. And both do this in relation to this storytelling device – a character type who has come to particular prominence of late. Is it related to the #metoo moment, assaults on abortion rights in the US and around the world, a growing sense of the way women have continued to be targeted as victims even as society pats itself on the back for being more equitable? Or is it maybe not so gendered – is the ‘girlness’ of the final girl a red herring?

Could it be that we live in an era of constant existential threat? Climate change, pandemics, domestic terrorism, global conflicts, constant mass shootings, police violence and the subsequent civil unrest, intractable political divisions that make it feel like society is on the cusp of absolute collapse…do we feel so under assault that “the one who survives, the one who finds a way to fight back against impossible odds, the one who has suffered like no one else, but nevertheless persists, the one who refuses death” is just more appealing than ever before? I don’t know – we used to live in fear of a nuclear holocaust, hell – there was The Holocaust, and as I understand the statistics, as you go further back in time, humans were more and more likely to die due to violence than they are now. But somehow that feeling of constant threat has just grown. Maybe for that, the media is to blame – or the ugly echo chambers of social media – or maybe it’s just the cumulative fatiguing effect of living with stress.

But maybe it’s all just coincidental – a story and the character at its heart has just grown more popular – we are more aware of it, and thus, we grab hold of it as a useful metaphor – as we have always done, especially with horror.

Anyway, they’re both really good books. I liked them. You should read them.