#10 Scared to Death

(Originally appeared in *Four Seasons*, Here in Hanover Press, 2001)

Recently, I was one of the guest faculty members at the 1999 New England Young Writers Conference at Breadloaf, which is part of Middlebury College in Vermont. While there, one of the academic-types referred to me as a “commercial writer,” which is a somewhat pejorative term, in college-circles, for someone who gets paid for what they write (so well, in fact, as to actually make a living at it). I cop a guilty plea to that one; but a step-down from being a commercial writer is the “genre writer” and I’m not all that crazy about being called that just because I’ve written novels and stories that may have been classified as speculative fantasy, science fiction, mystery, suspense, dark fantasy, or horror. (Uh . . . who are you kidding, they are all genres, pal.)

And so, a confession, of sorts. Even though I don’t want to be known only as a “horror writer,” I do like writing scary, disturbing tales.

Make sense?

Well, sense-or-not, let me tell you a story or two, and then maybe you'll see what I mean:

Story Number One is about me (who else?) when I was just a little kid. I guess maybe five years old, but I could have been six.

And so:

Down the block from our house there was a very large home, which had been a summer home for wealthy people in the previous century, and was at the time the home of the mother of a 50s movie star named Dorothy Lamour. Not that we lived in a posh neighborhood—rather, this old place kind of stood out on our block like the hood ornament on a '38 LaSalle. The house had been built in a different era, long before the creeping blight of GI tract housing had slowly surrounded its realty like kudzu.

Anyway, a part of the property which held the house was an acre or so of trees and undergrowth we neighborhood kids called “The Woods,” and the whole bunch of us post-way boomer-babies used to play in its honeysuckle and poison-ivied shadows for endless hours. The leading edge of these woods, where it touched the shoulder of the street was a magical strip of verge containing the mud-fossils of tire treadmarks and scraps of roadside debris. Like most kids I loved picking through this junk to find pieces of magic: fountain pens; tiny, empty liquor bottles called “miniatures,” the occasional “pin-up” magazine (hey, it was the Fifties, okay?) or calendar page; and even broken or discarded cereal box toys.

So there I was one day walking along the edge of The Woods, and I found this discarded comic book that hadn't yet been beaten by the rain and fused into a hard, unreadable slab. I can't remember the title because I know I had barely learned how to read at the time, but it was probably one of the old EC comics like Tales From The Crypt or Vault of Horror or another like that.

It doesn't matter, really, because I'll never forget the cover—an illustration of this guy in a barber's chair. He had this look of abject terror on his face as he looked in the mirror at a barber looming over him with a wickedly gleaming straight-razor. All you could see of the barber was the back of his head—a bald guy with a little tonsured monk's fringe around the back and over the ears. Now, this little tableau looked scary enough, but the worst part for me was an added detail: the mirror behind the guy in the chair.

Because when you looked in the mirror you could see the barber's face, only it wasn't really a face . . . it was a skull!

Yeah, a skull. Which for me was a very scary thing. It was, I think the first time, I had been made to realize that there was a skeleton underneath our skins, that everybody, even me, had a grim, scary skull under our faces. Ray Bradbury wrote a story called “Skeleton” which deals with the same self-realization, and I've often wondered if the story had its origins in a similar moment of childhood satori for Ray.

So picture the scene. A six-year-old Tommy, standing by the side of the road, staring at this lurid comics cover and being unable to move, unable to stop staring at the damned thing. Something was happening to me as I remained motionless and transfixed. Something that changed me, and made me a mutant, a dreamer. It was that very instant when I became hooked forever on things outré, and all the things which lurched and shambled off the known paths of knowledge and imagination.

I mean, I was scared by this tawdry comic, truly shaken to the young marrow in my bones. But I was also attracted to it.

I brought the comic home and hid it in my room, knowing instinctively my mother would trash it if she ever saw it. I wasn't so sure about my father because he loved to talk about things like ghosts and flying saucers and listening to creepy shows like Inner Sanctum and X Minus One on the radio or watching Lights Out on TV. I sensed a kindred spirit in my father, although I wasn't certain enough at that early age I could trust him yet.

So the comic stayed hidden and I would pull it out at night and look at the interior panels with a flashlight after I was supposed to be asleep. I couldn't read the stories very well, if at all, but the drawings were horrific enough—I have vivid memories of skeletal corpses clawing their way out of the ground (an overly familiar shtick in the old EC books) to exact revenge on those who killed them. Those panels surged with power, like lightning in a bottle, and I felt it tingle through me as I flipped through the pages. It was the first time I'd been made aware of mortality, of the finality and the corruption of death. I realized that I too would one day die, and the essential truth of it lay on my child psyche like an anvil.

But therein lies the reason for my fascination with the literature of the darkly fantastic and the horrific—a morbid curiosity and interest in Death. The Final Door, the Dark Passage, the Grim Reaper. Whatever you want to call it, it is the common denominator of our lives; the single intrigue which no one can ultimately ignore.

I think this is lynch-pin, the primary reason, which explains why many of us like to be scared.

We like to read horror stories because they allow us to vicariously explore what awaits us all. Maybe we have some unspoken, unconscious hope that by stepping through the looking glass of fiction to walk for awhile upon the grim landscape of death, it may shake loose some of its mystery and power to terrify us.

Stephen King talks about this in his marvelous examination of why being scared is cool—in his non-fiction book called Danse Macabre. Steve offers the notion of the “shape beneath the sheet.” He describes an over-riding compulsion felt by many of us to lift the edge of the sheet which conceals what just might be a body, or a even a monster, laid out on a covered slab. It is the door left ajar leading into darkness; it is the black mouth of an open cave; the heavy rag of night which hangs just beyond the glow of a campfire; the oddly configured shape which lurks in the shadowed corner of a room and simply refuses to resolve itself into anything familiar.

But there's more to it than that. I don't think it's enough to simply have an interest in death. Sure, that might be enough to attract at least once, but what is it that makes us keep staggering back for more? For us to be drawn to the tale of horror or the supernatural over and over, there must be more. There must be an enduring appeal which gets us hooked, makes us keep reading the stuff.

But that's not to say I know what it is . . . .

I can only offer a few guesses and reveal what works on me, and hope that maybe we're talking about some of the same things.

When written well, horror and suspense literature evokes an emotional response from its readers. This can range from a mild sensation of unease to something none other than abject repulsion. We're talking simple scared-of-the-dark and funny-noises-at-night up through bugfreak fear and all the way to mind-numbing, nihilist rejection. We're talking about a literature which has the ability to involve us on a visceral, as well as psychological level. We're talking about a literature that possesses an innate power to hammer out a flamenco dance on our imaginations and fire up a blowtorch under our phobias.

I don't know about you, but any writing that can do that to me is writing that's going to get my respect and attention.

The other reason I like a good horror story is strong characterization. Unlike mysteries which are heavy on plot, or science fiction which relies on startling premises or clever ideas, the tale of horror leans more in the direction of psychologically intriguing characters. From its earliest beginnings, as written by LeFanu, Poe, Bierce, de Maupassant, and the rest of the classic writers (even Melville and Kafka) the tale of horror always centered around the tormented psyche of a solitary character.

And I think that pretty much sums it up without a lot of scholarly bullshit. We like horror stories because they make us feel things, and because they're usually about fascinating, identifiable people—people like us.

Some of us are mutants, you see. We want to read this stuff and a small percentage of our lot is compelled (damned?) to actually write it. And as such, we carry the gene for Darkness; we have an unconscious sensory power which helps us locate the good stuff and savor it the way one might sip a fine vintage in a cool cellar.

Footnote: Story Number Two. Several years ago, Harlan Ellison introduced me to this great book called The PhotoJournal Guide to Comic Books compiled by Ernst and Mary Gerber. It is simply an incredible book—two volumes and 21,000 color illustrations of most of the covers of most of the comics ever published. An amazing compilation tailor-made for mutants like me, and I spent many hours flipping through it looking for that skull-faced barber. And as you can see from the accompanying illustration, I found him. My comic-grail was Unseen #15. The comic was not part of the infamous EC group, but rather a cheesy knock-off that only survived 16 issues before folding its flimsy tents. But that’s okay, a life-long question was finally answered, followed by a sense of completeness, and yeah, the cover stills scares me (well, okay, a little bit . . .)

Another Footnote: What I need to tell you is one of those moments that make you want to re-affirm your belief in the basic goodness that drives the human spirit. A while back, I got a manila mailer containing an almost mint copy of Unseen #15, complete with its own plastic protector. I was profoundly touched. One of my readers thought enough to send me a comic more than forty years old.

But wait . . . There's more!

The guy who sent it was none other than Jeff Gelb, who has edited the three Hot Blood anthologies and a couple of others. He read a M.A.F.I.A. column I’d done about looking for the elusive comic and apparentlyhad an extra copy lying around he didn’t need. I was truly stunned because I had been what you might call a “turd” to Jeff (we had a misunderstanding about a story I'd sent him for one of his anthologies, and I wrote him one of my patented hot-head-Italian, wish-you-didn't-mail-it letters (like the one I'd written to my ex-agent who shall remain un-named . . . ). Over time, Harlan Ellison had attempted to patch things up between us, and I had participated in the effort but figured Jeff was just going through the motions, and that he (justifiably) thought I was an unrelieved asshole—no matter what Harlan had said about me . . .

And then the comic comes in the mail and I no longer merely feel like a shit; no, I am content in the knowledge I have finally, zen-like, become one with the essence of excrement. I call Jeff Gelb, thank him profusely, and ask him what I can do to show my gratitude.

“Write me a story for Facing the Fear (his latest anthology),” he says.

What a right guy this Gelb is! He still wants to buy a story from me after I've been such an embarrassing mook. Turn out, he loved the piece I eventually sent him, but the real point of all this is that Jeff Gelb is not like me—he's one of the real good guys. (but, hey, I have a suitable-for-framing copy of the comic that scared the bejeezus out of me all those years ago!)

Okay, if you liked this one, rec me to your friends and maybe spring a few buck for my short fiction collection, Memos from the Abyss. All my short stories published since 2001.

https://borderlandspress.com/shop/authors/thomas-f-monteleone/memos-from-the-abyss-by-thomas-f-monteleone-signed-limited-edition/