Dumb Things People Say: Stop Grossing Me Out!

When I wrote my last word on this subject, Dumb Things People Say: The Mangling of Popular Expressions, I didn't anticipate that I would one day write a sequel. I should have. People do say an overabundance of stupid things, after all, and there is not one category of ill-conceived speech but several. This particular one puts the "gory" in "category."

WARNING: The following contains images of violence, as well as the most notorious and versatile four-letter word in the English language. If you have delicate sensibilities... then I don't know how you manage in modern society, and I sympathize. Oh, and you read on at your own risk.

You wouldn't expect to find an image of horrifying bloodiness in a discussion of the best science fiction and fantasy books of the year, would you? I certainly didn't. But in Genreville's blog post on the subject, Rose Fox states that Daryl Gregory's short story collection Unpossible "blew my head off and then dumped cold water down the bleeding stump of my neck. Fortunately that’s how I like it. "

No Rose, you wouldn't like that. I admit that once your head was actually off, you wouldn't mind the cold water being poured down your neck, because you'd be too dead to feel it or care one way or another. But I maintain that if somebody came at you with any instrument of decapitation, explosive or otherwise, you'd put up a vigorous argument, even if that somebody was as talented a writer as Daryl Gregory.

I'm normally a fan of Genreville, and I sincerely believe that that metaphor was not Rose Fox's finest moment.

Do people think about what they're saying? Do they picture in their minds the thing they are describing, really picture it in something other than an oh-look-Wile-E.-Cayote-is-alive-again-after-falling-off-that-cliff cartoonish sort of way? I'm sure they must not, because if they did, they would never post something like that on their blogs. They might say it in conversation—and be sorry an instant afterwards. But writing and posting takes more premeditation.

I can't help myself. When somebody talks of chopping off a head and pouring water down the stump, I immediately picture just that, and I don't enjoy it one bit. I have a vivid imagination. I know that not everybody does. It surprises me that somebody so lacking in that area that she can comfortably speak about pouring cold water down bloody neck-stumps, gets much out of reading novels. It's a wonderment.

As is the concept of skull-fucking. So many questions arise. Why would you want to? Where exactly would you insert your penis?* The ear hole? The eye socket? What sort of pleasure could you possibly get out of such an activity, other than the vengeful, twisted satisfaction of degrading your enemy's remains? And finally, just how much would you have to hate somebody to want to do this to them?†

Exotic as it sounds, skull-fucking has apparently become a part of the common discourse. I first encountered it maybe sixteen, seventeen years back. I was in a fit of pique over the bug-ridden unusability of a piece of Microsoft software (some things don't change). I don't remember what I typed into the search engine (this was pre-Google. Imagine! I think my favourite search engine at the time was Infoseek); probably something like "Microsoft sucks." Up came a link to, "Fucking the skull of Microsoft." Curiosity overcame repulsion, and I clicked. I was sorry I did. It was an illustration, you see. Since then, skull-fucking has become sufficiently socially acceptable that Jon Stewart sometimes mentions it in an offhand way on The Daily Show.

Likewise, Steven Colbert, host of The Colbert Report, often invites his interview guests to "rip me a new one." Considering that this is short for "rip me a new asshole," isn't it amazing that this expression has become an acceptable part of polite discourse? Just think about the implications. Think about what is involved. Unless you'd rather not. I think I'd rather not. It's much more horrible than skull-fucking, which, after all, can only take place once the victim is mercifully dead, probably for a long time (unless the perpetrator is so eager to begin the ritual that he uses artificial means to remove the flesh from the bones).

It seems to me that any culture in which such grotesqueries are so casually bandied about is one that has become extraordinarily numbed and hardened to images of violence. How did that happen? If, in fact, it happened. I'm sure some would argue that it's a normal part of the human condition. But this is a discussion worthy of a whole other blog post, one which I will probably write soon. For now, back to the topic at hand: things people say.

At my old job, my coworkers and I once got into a discussion about the internet acronym WTF. I probably don't have to tell you what this means, since you know the internet well or you wouldn't be reading this, but just in case (and because I like my naughty words typed out in full): it stands for What The Fuck. My coworker found it strange that the average internet user thinks it's perfectly polite to type this, even in forums where they'd never use the full four-letter word. He quoted a comedian as saying,"Now you've made me think of that word. I don't want that word in my head!"

I don't mind that word in my head, but there are any number of blood-soaked images I don't want in my head. I would appreciate it if the young people of today could keep them to themselves.

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* I don't mean to be sexist in my assumption that a penis must be involved in skull-fucking, and I hope I haven't offended any young women who want equality in the realm of doing disgusting things. It's simply that I believe—perhaps wrongly, and feel free to correct me if I err—that if a vulva rather than a penis was involved, the activity would be called something else. Skull-humping, perhaps. Back

† Actually, that's not my final question. My final question is, Is this something that a great novel or short story collection might do to Rose's skull after blowing it off its neck? Just asking. Back

Four Flavours of Horror

After a long hiatus, I've been reading and thinking about (and even writing, a little) horror fiction again. My father introduced my brother and I to horror as soon as we were old enough not to wet our pants and start crying. He read us Dracula by Bram Stoker, one chapter a night. He read us the short stories of Edgar Allen Poe, swooping his voice up at the climax, making me almost jump out of my skin. When I became a teenager, I went through the usual rite of passage of reading my way through the works of Stephen King.

But as an adult, I drifted away from King and horror in general, tired and bored of blood and guts. King once said, "If I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out". He's far from being alone, and therein lies the problem. The easiest, laziest thing you can do in horror is be gory and disgusting. It's not a coincidence that this easiest of routes is also the least effective. I remember that ho-hum feeling creeping over me (not the kind of creeping the horror writer wants to induce) when I read Brian Keene and Steven L. Shrewsbury's short story "Death Comes For All" in Apex Magazine (vol. 1, iss. 12). Going nowhere and making no sense, this story features an army of zombies that emerge from the sea and have to be cut down in the usual tedious, limb-chopping way. Zombies have been so done to death (ha!) that their mere presence in a story usually signals mediocrity. This kind of thing gives horror a bad name.

The trick is to find horror that does something other (or at least more) than gross out. Sometimes you have to turn to the classics to remind yourself what horror is supposed to be. Poe had the ability to put the reader into the mind of his rage- or madness-driven characters. King, at his best, achieves this too. He develops Carrie and describes her miseries so well that even when she goes on her murderous rampage the reader cannot help but sympathize with her. This second flavour on offer in Horror's freezer might be called "psychological horror."

This is a bit parenthetical, but I'd like to mention that what made Poe a horror writer of unparallelled greatness was his ability to orchestrate the climax of his story so beautifully, getting it to land not merely on the last paragraph but on the last sentence or even on the last word. One of Poe's best-known stories is The Telltale Heart, and rightly so, for the climax is in the last two words. But though The Black Cat is less-well known, in it Poe achieves something even more impressive: a single-word climax. If you have not yet read these stories, do so now. Poe made horror into poetry. (Appropriate, given his name.)

H.P. Lovecraft came along about a century later than Poe but is no less influential. I hadn't read any Lovecraft until quite recently, when I played Munchkin Cthulhu and decided to find out what all that Cthulhu business was about. Somebody told me that Lovecraft stories are psychological. I disagree. Poe was much better at that sort of thing. Lovecraft makes his characters go mad a lot too, but it isn't as convincing. He seems to have conceived of the human mind as terribly fragile, as if you could go mad after finding something gruesome in your box of Cracker Jacks.

He also differentiates himself from Poe by his fondness for monsters. Many of Poe's short stories have nothing of the supernatural in them, and that is their strength: the recognition that every manner of evil arises from human beings, alone, unaided. Lovecraft, on the other hand, loves a good monster. To him, there is something monstrous about life already--"Life is a hideous thing," he wrote in his short story Arthur Jermyn, and I believe he meant it. So it was not a great leap for him from humanity to monstrosity.

Consequently, his flavour of horror is not so much the horror of psychology as the horror of the icky idea. A man breeds with an ape and produces a line of half-human creatures. An isolated family becomes so corrupted over generations that they transform into killing, burrowing creatures. Lovecraft was the master of concepts that were interesting in an awful sort of way.

The Holy Grail of horror is, of course, to genuinely frighten the reader. To induce not merely a wave of nausea or suspense or pity or laughter but actual fear in the reader, to keep him from dropping easily off to sleep that night, to affect his dreams--that is surely the horror writer's ultimate achievement. Few have managed it. King never has, and probably won't. I don't think Lovecraft did either. Poe could do it, in brief flashes. Curiously, the most frightening thing I have ever read was in not a horror but a science fiction novel.

Ventus by Karl Schroeder is mostly concerned with terraforming robots that are slipping out of control and need repair. But there's also a man who is part machine, and he's operated as a machine for so long that his humanity is completely lost to him, for a time. During this time, three grave-robbers cross his path in a catacomb. He murders one. Another escapes. The third has the worst fate:

Choltas had heard the footsteps of the devil fade away. He knew it would be back unless he stayed very still. This was the thing's home; it world not venture out into the world above. So though he couldn't hear it, he knew it was there. If he stayed completely still, wrapped around himself in this corner in total darkness, it might not find him. But if he so much as sneezed, he knew it would be on him instantly.

Even now it might be creeping up on him silently. He wrapped more tightly around himself, and tried not to breathe. Time passed, but Choltas did not move. When thirst began to torture him. he stayed still. He wet himself and shat in his pants, quietly. And eventually, delirium overcame him; he heard his mother's voice, saw drifting pictures of his home.

He kept his arms around his knees, and his face buried there against his own flesh. And he breathed weaker and weaker, aware at last only of the murmur of his own head and the torment of cold and thirst, overridden by a fear he could no longer identify.

Stay still, stay still.

Its hand hangs above me.

This is the most perfect depiction of primal, frozen terror I have ever encountered.