Short Story Archives - The Mindflayer

Review of #DeadSealChallenge by S. C. Mendes & Nikki Noir

“Here we go. On three.” Looking at the infected penis on the cutting board, Gary fought back a grimace. He held the cock steady with his gloved left hand. His right hand held a cleaver. “One...two—”

If the opening lines of #DeadSealChallenge don’t grab you, few things will. Of course, they might disgust you as well, but S. C. Mendes and Nikki Noir have a habit of being able to hold your gaze even when showing you the most depraved scenarios and people. As storytellers, both writers exhibit a leaning towards the cinematic, and their ability to focus a camera unflinchingly is one resulting trait of their collaborations.

#DeadSealChallenge is a surprising short story, told Tarantino-style. We begin in media res, when everything has royally gone to hell. Through an interview with one of the principle characters, we begin to flash back and piece together the missing elements of the story. I say the story is surprising not just because of the strangeness of some of its concepts—bizarro authors eat your hearts out—but also because I’m frankly amazed at how much the two authors have crammed into a tale that can be no more than 6,000 words. #DeadSealChallenge touches on male insecurity, influencer culture, YouTube success, the depravities of the dark web, hashtag crazes sweeping the world, the monetisation of human shame, and the problems of fame, especially that unique brand of fame: “internet celebrity”. It’s difficult to say the main characters are likeable, but they are certainly believable, and you willingly follow them down the rabbit hole to see if they really can pull off their elaborate and highly immoral scheme.

#DeadSealChallenge explores the nature of viral media—and please bear that phrase in mind, because it might be relevant in more ways than one! I’ll say no more, lest I spoil a delicious surprise for horror lovers!—whilst itself being a viral piece of media that I have no doubt will infect the internet. When reading work by Mendes or Noir, one always has to be sensitive to the double meanings of things. A virus can infect the mind, body, or an online presence. A seal, in this context, is meant in the sense of the animal; but it won’t hurt you to also consider what happens when we break a different kind of seal… Seals keep things shut in, after all. Whilst Noir and Mendes clearly love writing about extreme topics, their work never descends into extremity for the sake of it, or shock for shock’s sake. Read between the lines and new meanings emerge; this is what makes their collaborative work so rich.

If I have one criticism, it is the same criticism I always levy at collaborations between S.C. Mendes and Nikki Noir: that I could stand to read 60,000 words, rather than 6,000! This story and concept has more places it can go. So, allow me to start a new hashtag:

#DeadSealChallengeII.

Let’s make it viral, folks!

You can purchase #DeadSealChallenge on Godless.

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Review of Spontaneous Human Combustion by Richard Thomas

Spontaneous Human Combustion is Richard Thomas’s fourth short story collection, featuring 14 tales ranging from cosmic horror, to science fiction, fantasy, and into realms beyond any simple definition. Richard Thomas has a unique style of writing, a trademark syntax that I can spot a mile away, though at the same time he is also chameleon-esque, changing the style and flavour of his prose in order to suit the aesthetics of his story, or to further highlight a theme he is exploring. This is perhaps why he is such an adept of the short story form in particular (though I do adore his novel Disintegration in particular).

Stephen King describes short stories as “a kiss in the dark” and Richard Thomas exemplifies this transitory (and sometimes transcendental) experience, in which the very brevity of the form becomes the source of its power. We can only connect with the divine momentarily. Yet, to do so can be life-changing. In this way, Richard Thomas’ short stories more closely resemble poems. They do not always operate on the plane of conscious understanding. They are not meant to be comprehended through rational intellect, but to touch something lying beneath that. I found some of the stories in this collection to be moving without really understanding them in full. This collection also took me twice as long as it should have done to read because I was drawn inexorably to re-read virtually every story in the collection (and was rewarded every time with new insight)!

I am fairly sure that this collection will be divisive in multiple ways. Some people will hate the poetic styling. Some will love it. And beyond this, there is unlikely to be any consensus on what the best story in this collection is. The range on offer here prohibits an easy narrowing down. As I mentioned earlier, Richard Thomas touches on virtually every speculative genre known to humankind, and combines them in often unexpected ways. Secondary world fantasies give way to dystopian science fiction. Lovecraftian horror is mixed with hope-punk. One senses a mind behind all these stories striving relentlessly for originality, to forge something new and not rely on tropes or easy wins. In the extensive and enlightening Endnotes at the back of this collection, Richard Thomas often mentions “challenging himself”, and one can feel that these stories are an almost Barker-esque attempt to discover something beyond the mundane, to “[explore] the further reaches of human experience” (Hellraiser). There is an experimental nature to this which is by definition inexact, but can produce startling alchemy.

As I have said before, the experience will be highly personal, and no doubt there will be little agreement on which are the most potent stories in this collection, but I will highlight my own personal top four to give you a flavour of the book:

“Ring of Fire”

I would be criminally remiss not to mention this story, as it is the longest in the collection, practically a novella. It was first published in Seven Deadliest Sins, an anthology of seven novelette / novella-length works that centred on the eponymous Seven Deadly Sins, so I had read the story once before (my review of this collection can be found here:https://storgy.com/2019/05/29/book-review-the-seven-deadliest-edited-by-patrick-beltran-and-d-alexander-ward/). “Ring of Fire” is a little bit like a Lynchian Möbius strip, a circle that doesn’t quite complete, a mystery that forever unfolds but never quite solves; at the same time, it’s a tremendous character-arc. It is a slow burner, in which the seemingly explainable and mundane scenes we’re privy too are steadily re-contextualised until we realise that nothing has been “normal” or “explainable” from the start. It is also carries an indescribable sadness to it, as each repetition, each “circuit” of the Möbius, seems to lead us not towards salvation but deeper into the elliptical loops of the psyche. It’s worth mentioning this is not the only story in the collection that involves repeated scenarios or looping narrative. There are several “Groundhog Days” contained in Spontaneous Human Combustion. Some are literal, some spiritual, and others more subtle, but the idea of being stuck in a loop that either cannot be broken, or can only be broken by our most extraordinary efforts—with great sacrifice—is arguably the defining image of the entire collection, and a metaphor for the human condition.

“The Caged Bird Sings In a Darkness Of Its Own Creation”

This is another story that I’d read once before; it was first published in Storgy’s Shallow Creek anthology, one of the weirdest and most underrated collections of fiction ever put to print. You can also read my review of that collection here: http://themindflayer.com/review-shallow-creek-storgy/. Richard Thomas’s story is the last story in the collection, and for good reason. It is a total mind-f*ck of chthonic proportions. It centres on Krinkles The Klown, who is a kind of Pennywise for Shallow Creek. But rather than going for shock-horror and killer clown antics, Richard Thomas instead tries to peel back the laters of Krinkles and show us why he is so strange (interestingly, there is another story in Spontaneous Human Combustion about a clown taking off their makeup—I sense a theme emerging!). I do not normally enjoy narratives that leave so much in the reader’s hands, but what I loved about “The Caged Bird Sings In a Darkness Of Its Own Creation” is that Richard Thomas give us a series of choices, and we realise that this is exactly what Krinkles has faced: a series of choices, bargains, and decisions that have led him to the edge of the abyss. The story can be seen as bleak, in some ways, but is this how Krinkles sees it? Richard Thomas shows us that perception is everything in this tale. What we choose to see in the mirror is the reality we inhabit. The story has two strange parallels: Twin Peaks, especially Part 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return (in which the macrocosm of the Lynch-universe is seemingly unveiled); and secondly, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. In terms of the second comparison, not so much the retro late-seventies vibe, more the contact with something entirely other, and the sense of obsession, panic, and euphoria such contact can bring.

“Nodus Tollens”

This story was a huge surprise. It is almost an outlier of the collection, in that it is written in a more prosaic and down-to-earth style. Richard Thomas himself described it as his most “King-like” story, and I would have to agree. As much as I love Richard Thomas’ impressionistic bent, it was refreshing, indeed electrifying, to see him tackle a story in a more grounded way, and as a consequence the story stands out. The title, Nodus Tollens, is a phrase invented by John Koenig on The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows which means “the realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore”. Thus, what starts as a simple hand of poker quickly becomes a cosmic game in which sin must be unburdened.

“Undone”

This story was the biggest surprise in the collection. When I first started reading it, I was uncertain whether I would enjoy it. Essentially, and I don’t think this is not giving away too much, the entire 1,500 word story is written in one sentence. Usually, I would regard this as pretentious; however, Richard Thomas pulls it off, for several reasons, perhaps the most important of which is that the frenetic, relentless nature of the single run-on sentence is used to encapsulate the relentless nature of a terrifying, heart-pounding chase. This clever mimesis justifies the technique and elevates the intensity of the narrative. The plot of the story is simple, or seems to be. Two people are running from something unspeakable. What emerges at the end of the tale, however, is a moment of transcendence, of contact with something ineffable and divine. It is weird, grotesque, beautiful, harrowing, and spiritually uplifting. There are shades of China Miéville here. Never in a million years could I have guessed this would be my favourite story in the collection, but it is.

Spontaneous Human Combustion is not easy reading (to be fair, in general I do not find collections easy to read due to the stop-start nature of digesting a series of stories); however, it is a rewarding and powerful experience on so many levels. Richard Thomas pushes the envelope of what is possible in fiction, and strives to show us something truly sublime. Perhaps the collection is best summarised in Richard Thomas’s own words from his story “Undone”: “everything I could never be, nothing we have been before”.

You can pre-order the collection here:

Amazon UK

Amazon US

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The Cathedral of the Deep Part 3: The Gothic Ending

And we’re back! Like a slippery thing from the grave, the Cathedral of the Deep series returns for its third installment. Thank you to everyone who sent me kind messages about these talks; it was wonderful to hear how the classes had benefited writers and helped them finish stories they were struggling with, or given them ideas for new stories!

To recap, in parts one and two of this talk, we looked at how we can define Gothic, and how to write a Gothic opening, respectively. We covered the four key elements of Gothic: mood, architecture, religion, and lyricism. We also looked at opening lines, and how they work in relation to the rest of a piece. We also looked at the five act structure.

Today, we will specifically be looking at endings, which is the fifth act of the five act structure: catharsis. Catharsis is something that is quite difficult to grasp without a concrete definition. The Oxford dictionary defines it as: “the process of releasing, and thereby providing relief from, strong or repressed emotions.” The secondary definition is “purgation”. I think the word “release” is most helpful here. Catharsis is the moment of “release” at the end of a film, poem, story, piece of music, whatever the medium is. We have experienced something terrible, something that has taken a hold of us, and then are freed from it, often through tears.

Now, in order to talk about catharsis and endings, I’m going to need to talk about plot, so inevitably I’m going to be spoiling certain shows, books, and stories. There’s no way around it. So, steel yourselves friends! Spoilers are coming!

LOSS & GAIN

Before we can talk about catharsis, we need to talk more broadly about how endings work. I’m going to give you one of my best-ever pieces of advice for ending a story – any story. It’s from Tristine Rainer’s book Your Life As Story, where she says: the definition of a climax is that something is lost so something can be gained. It should be noted that this doesn’t have to be literal. For example, in a Romantic Comedy, a character’s pride might die so that they can become a better person and their love might live. In Fantasy novels and films, often one of the heroes must make a sacrifice and give their own life so that others might live and return home after their adventures to a joyful and healed world. To use a Gothic example: Dracula is the epitome of this. The heroic American Quincy P. Morris perishes in the final assault on Dracula, giving his life so that the curse of Dracula might be abated. In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff must lose his sight (the distractions and corruption of appearances and social ideals) in order to truly find love with the one who is right for him: Catherine.

It is vitally important that the ending has both something lost and something gained. Often, when endings “don’t work”, it’s because the balance is wrong. Nothing is lost, but the heroes all manage to save the day without a single consequence. There’s no threat, there’s no significance, there’s no reality. Or, the other way, where everything is lost, and the gain is so minimal that it is meaningless. Increasingly, with the advent of modernist ideologies and criticism of heroic narrative, films are looking to the “hopeless ending”. The recent horror movie Hereditary is one such example, although there is arguably a small nugget of “gain” in that the daughter, Charlie, realises her true purpose in the world. However, in my view it does not land with the sledgehammer of emotional resonance for this reason: The balance is wrong.

There is a phrase I hear a lot among my fellows which is: “The movie earned that ending”. I like it a lot, because it exactly encapsulates this ending theory: you have to pay a price to gain something.

Exercise 1.1

So, when you are thinking about your short story, or whatever project it is (and it even works for music – though they call it “counterpoint”, and it is to do with the relationship between harmony and disharmony), ask yourself this important question: what is lost so what can be gained?

Create a table, with two columns, one entitled “loss” and the other “gain” and make a full list of everything in your narrative that is lost and gained. Now ask yourself whether the balance is right. If you are going for a bleaker, darker story: then more needs to be lost. If you are going for a more up-beat story, then more needs to be gained.

FRAMES & STAGES

So, now that we know this foundation, how can we take this one step further and use this to elicit emotional release? Killing off a beloved character is not a guarantee of emotion by any stretch. Think of how poorly the fifth Harry Potter movie, Order of the Phoenix, rendered the death of Sirius Black in contrast with the books. In the novel, I felt his death (which is the cathartic moment of that book) like a stab wound to the chest. In the films, it was laughable, a side-note. There are many reasons, some technical and some broad, about why the execution was flawed, but the primary one is that the balance was not framed right. Gothic endings, indeed any ending, needs what I call a frame. This is the window through which you are seeing the ending, it is the lens you have placed over your cinematic camera as well as the positioning of the camera itself.

If you imagine the events of your story as transpiring in a mysterious other world, which can only be glimpsed through a window, the window and its frame is how this vision of another world is presented to you. Through another window, things might look quite different. This applies, of course, to the whole story, in one sense, but it is specifically relevant to the end. The other way I think of this is not as a frame but as a stage. If your ending was being performed dramatically (for some of you reading this it may be literally true) then how would it be staged? What type of stage would it be set on? I will be looking at these stages and frames, particularly ones relevant to Gothic, and talking about how they work.

This is not to suggest that this list compiles every ending known to human kind or possible. Of course, there are variations, anomalies, and infinite complexity within (and without) of the framework, but these will certainly help you get started and thinking about your ending. When you have mastered how these work, you can then subvert them for your own end.

THE MIRROR

In True Detective’s iconic first season, there are many complex losses and gains. The killer, in one sense, is lost, which gains closure for many characters and us as followers of the investigation. Rust’s nihilism is lost, which gains a newfound spirituality and hope. The resentment between Rust and his partner Marty is lost – they forgive one another – so their friendship might live. The list goes on, which is why it is so powerful. The moment of catharsis is achieved by having the seemingly invincible, inscrutable, unshakeable Rust Cohle (played by Matthew McConaughey) finally break down with the realisation that there is a life after death and his daughter is waiting for him there with “nothing but that love” – in other words, she has forgiven him. He expects enmity and blames himself for her death – it is what’s haunted him his whole life – but the realisation of this love, something positive after the seemingly endless bleakness of his world, breaks him. In watching his release of emotion, we as an audience are triggered, and our buried emotions are released. This frame is what I call the mirror. We witness the moment of catharsis and are moved ourselves. Rust’s loss of hopelessness, by realising there is hope in life after death, is directly tied in to the moment of cathartic narrative and emotional release, which is why it works so beautifully.

Shakespeare often uses the mirror. For example, the ending of Hamlet (which I consider a Gothic play) shows us Hamlet’s death in the arms of his one true friend, possibly even lover depending on interpretation, Horatio. Horatio’s profound grief, and the sense of someone truly magnificent needlessly lost, is what moves us to tears. Hamlet himself is seemingly at peace: “The rest is silence”, but it is Horatio’s sorrow: “Goodnight sweet prince” which rouses such catastrophic emotion within us. Horatio is the everyman whom we can relate to. As audience members, we recognise ourselves in him. He tries to guide Hamlet and curb his madness, frustrated by his irrationality and procrastination. In showing us a broken Horatio, we see the mirror of ourselves, our sense of hopelessness. The gain at the end of Hamlet is, of course, diplomatic unity and the avenging of his father, but there is also a tragically small gain in that we feel Hamlet can finally know peace from his own raging thoughts.

THE SECRET

This is a subtle, subtle frame that is very difficult to pull off. The most successful example of it of recent years is the film Calvary, which starred Brendan Gleeson. This masterful film, which depicts the final days of a priest who is told, in the confession box, he will be killed in seven days, is one of the most profoundly moving I have seen in a long time (it might even be my favourite film). This film is very low budget, carried by its brilliant actors and poetic script, which probes the nature of sin, suffering, detachment, and, of course, God. Increasingly, one feels the despair of being a person of God in our modern world, which is so without values or dignity. Yet, the brilliance of the film is the courage the humble priest shows in the face of such mind-breaking adversity, and his compassion even for those that spit at him. There is also an element of who-dunnit, about it, as we try to work out who the killer might be.

The ending of the film is deceptively powerful. The priest, after contemplating running away, decides to meet his fate as Christ did. He confronts the killer on the beach, and is shot dead. Following his death, there is a slow reel of all the people in the village whom the priest has interacted with. We see that the adulterers are still committing adultery, the money launderers still stealing, the world unchanged. The final scene is the priest’s daughter, about to speak to her father’s killer (who is now in prison), weeping as she remembers her fathers words, which are that “forgiveness is underrated”. You might, quite rightly, be asking, what in the name of Hell is gained here? The priest dies, the killer is arrested, nobody learns anything. Except, that is what we learn as an audience. We are witnesses to something momentous and awe-inspiring: an act of sacrifice for people who do not actually care. This is the “unsung hero” narrative. The hero has saved everyone, but nobody knows or cares. He has saved them, died for them as Christ did, despite their ingratitude. That is the breathtaking nobility of the film. The priest loses his life, so that we might gain an understanding of what true human courage is. I call this frame the secret, because it is almost as if the story has shared a secret with the audience, something not even the characters can see.

A good example from the literary world is Stephen King’s 11/22/63. In this book, the hero Jake Epping travels back through time in order to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Eventually, he realises it is impossible to accomplish this without un-seaming the universe. The problem is that he has fallen in love with a high school teacher, Sadie, in that previous timeline, but he must give up that love to fix the world. There is a terrible, heart-rending scene at the end of the book where Jake goes to visit Sadie in his own current (and now fixed) timeline; Sadie is in her 80s and has no memory of Jake, but she experiences a strange sensation that she might know him. The two share a dance. It is an incredible scene that reduced me to floods of tears when I first read it, and it is this powerful because we sense just how much is lost: the future they should have, by rights, shared together. It is also heart-rending because no one can ever know what Jake has been through and how much he has given up to, quite literally, save the world. This is the secret. Only we, the Constant Readers, and perhaps Jake, are privy to all the facts of the case that means we can experience this cathartic moment.

THE TRANSFERENCE / THE CURSE

This is in some ways similar to the secret except that the knowledge/ revelation is passed from one character in the story to another. One of the most iconic and easiest examples of this is: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The poem details an encounter between a young and naive wedding guest and the eponymous mariner. The mariner, cursed to wander the land forever telling his bleak, harrowing tale, accosts the wedding guest and tells him his story. At the end of the story, it tells us that the wedding guest goes to bed and “a sadder and a wiser man / he rose the morrow morn”. In other words, though the mariner is still cursed to repeat his tale, the wedding guest has learned from the experience, and the transference of knowledge has had a positive effect. This is highly cathartic, as we realise that someone else’s suffering is another’s learning, and that while the mariner is doomed and a “fixed point”, others can still avoid his tragic fate.

Another great example of this is Frankenstein. I mentioned in part two of the Cathedral of the Deep that Frankenstein uses a framed narrative, couching Victor Frankenstein’s bitter tale within the journals of a seafarer in the Artic, the “Genevese” noble. It is the Genevese noble who is changed by hearing the tale of Frankenstein, and who goes forward into their life with a new sense of perspective.

It is also possible to subvert this ending by making the transference a “curse” that is passed on to the next generation. This is a classic 80s horror cinematic trope. Evil is seemingly defeated, but in actuality, the curse is merely transferred on to the next person. This can be cathartic as well (catharsis can come from downer endings too). For example, the ending of something like Kubrick’s The Shining, which shows us Jack Torrance has “always been here” at the hotel, is a cathartic moment, because it implies some deeper history behind the psychological breakdown. Is the entire film, in fact, from the perspective of Danny Torrance, who is feeling the dirty secrets of the hotel through his psychic sensitivity? Or did Jack Torrance have some undisclosed history at the hotel which is glimpsed at the end? Is Jack the subject of some kind of curse – transferred to him by the other dark spirits that speak to him when he is in captivity in the store room? There are no straight answers (although perhaps Mr King thinks differently!), but it is certainly that final shot that completes the film and draws together the dissonant elements into a well of emotion and release.

THE CRUX / SCALES

This frame works particularly well for short stories and movies, but not so well for novels or longer cinematic forms (such as a television series). This essentially is when you build to a climactic moment, a crux, where everything hangs in the balance, and then you end at that moment. This might sound like you are cheating the reader / audience of an ending, but in actual fact, if you have set up enough of the dominoes, the reader will have already drawn their own conclusions on how it is going to turn out, and it is in feeling this sense of climax, of everything weighed (hence the scales), that they feel the emotion. The reason it does not work with long forms is that when you, as a reader, have invested so much time, you cannot leave it to chance. Too much uncertainty here will break the story’s spell and create anger and discord. But for short forms, the ambiguity, what some coaches call “negative capability”, will work in your favour.

So, let’s look at an example. John Carpenter’s The Thing ends on what some people consider a cliff-hanger, but I consider it a perfect example of a crux or scales ending. At the conclusion of the film, there are two survivors, Childs (Keith David) and MacReady (Kurt Russel), sitting in the snow, watching their facility, and any hope of getting out of the Arctic wastes, burn to the ground. They have the following exchange:

Childs: Fire’s got the temperature up all over the camp. Won’t last long though.

MacReady: Neither will we.

Childs: How will we make it?

MacReady: Maybe we shouldn’t.

Childs: If you’re worried about me…

MacReady: If we’ve got any surprises for each other, I don’t think we’re in much shape to do anything about it.

Childs: Well, what do we do?

MacReady: Why don’t we just… wait here for a little while… see what happens?

As a viewer, we realise there are two possibilities: either the Thing is dead and they are both going to die out in the cold, or one of them is the Thing, and everything is in jeopardy, because it means at some point the Thing will be dug up and the cycle will start again. There is no definitive answer as to what the reality of the situation is (and it has been hotly debated for years), but that is not the point. The film ends on this ominous, bleak note. Yet, there is an immense catharsis in this. We realise at this moment what the movie is really about, which is paranoia. If we look past the shape-shifting body-horror elements, we can see that this is a movie about suspecting those close to us, being unsure of everything we know, and how doubt can tear apart even the strongest and most disciplined people.

Another famous example, though perhaps less Gothic, is the 60s movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. At the end, we do not really see what happens to the pair, we are left on a moment of heroic confrontation, where they stand up together to impossible odds. It is left to our imaginations exactly how that showdown goes down, although we can be fairly certain both Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid are slain. If they had showed us the conclusion, a slow motion shot of them being gunned down, it would have been piteous and melodramatic. By holding back, leaving us on the crux moment where everything hangs in the balance, we feel the emotion of it all the more powerfully. This technique taps into the power of human imagination too. Our own version of what happens when that door bursts open will actually always be better than anything they could show us.

So, those are four frames which you can use to elicit catharsis for your Gothic ending, along with a foundation of loss & gain to weight it and make it land, to “earn” it. To recap, we have: the mirror, where you show the reader a mirror of themselves, the secret, where something is accomplished beyond the knowledge of the characters, the transference, where tragic knowledge is passed on, and the crux, where we end at a moment of climactic confrontation. There are many more frames, but I have gone on long enough, so these are perhaps best reserved for another essay

Exercise 1.2

Choose one frame and re-write your story through this prism. How does it change things? Do you need to add characters or take away certain scenes? Has it improved the overall emotional resonance of the scene?

Thank you so much for coming this far. I hope that this class has been of use to you. We’ve now reached the end of Part 3. I really enjoyed writing up these notes from my seminar, and I hope they are of use to you in some way. Thanks very much for taking the time to read it, it means a lot to me. In the future, there may be further classes, with more frames and techniques, depending on interest. If you do want more, feel free to leave a comment on my website, or to message me on Twitter.

If you feel that you have benefited from today’s class, then please check out my KoFi page, where you can donate $3 to “buy me a coffee” to help me keep producing free resources like this. Do not feel pressure to do so, but small contributions can go a long way for creators like me.

Until next time, my friends!

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The Cathedral of the Deep Part 1: What Gothic Is

INTRODUCTION

Last year, I ran a workshop where I talked about Gothic and Horror literature. This was called: “The Cathedral of the Deep: What Gothic Is and How To Write It”. I thought, given there was some interest in the topic, that it would be great to share some of the ideas I talked about in this seminar online. Now, while I have studied Gothic literature pretty extensively (and Horror is a kind of raison d’etre), I am by no means the sole expert on the subject, and there are many other academics, writers, and enthusiasts who have their own opinions on the matter. I do not purport to present the only way to understand and write Gothic here, this is merely my own approach to it. What I hope is that these methods and ideas can help you in producing your own work, whether it be a short story, poem, or even a video-game, script, or movie. The underlying concepts of Gothic are beyond one medium of expression.

WHAT YOU WILL NEED

This is not just a blog or opinion piece; I intend it more as a class. So, I’d recommend that you have a notebook and pen handy. Also, you might want to have Twitter open in another window. You can message me any questions as you read along: @josephwordsmith . I will try my best to get back to you as quickly as possible. I’m also going to dropping a lot of reading/viewing recommendations, so make sure you make a note of the things you want to check out. This class is going to be divided into two parts, due to the depth into which I plan to go. That’s pretty much it folks!

A (VERY, VERY) SELECTIVE HISTORY OF HORROR

Modern Horror has its roots in Gothic literature. While there are subtle differences, shaped by time and society, understanding classic Gothic literature, and how it works, can give us insight into how to write Horror that is a cut above the rest, that is more than cheap scares or gratuity and transcends into something cathartic and emotionally resonant. So, let us take a walk through a history of horror.

Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto is widely regarded as the first Gothic-Horror novel, but the Gothic stretches back much farther. In the Elizabethan period, Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe both wrote plays that can not only easily be classifiable as Gothic, but may even have been used as templates by subsequent writers for what Gothic is. First, let’s consider two of Shakespeare’s most well-known plays: Macbeth and Hamlet. Macbeth is the height of Gothic, with its bloody deeds, visions, ghosts, magic and atmosphere of terror. It remains one of the most concentrated examinations of evil ever written. Hamlet is perhaps less typically Gothic than Macbeth, but contains ghosts, religiosity, madness, and many other themes that are explored within a tense narrative that breeds unease in the audience. I would recommend you go to see either of these plays, so long as they are being put on by a good company. If you wish to see a truly Gothic cinematic adaptation of Macbeth, I recommend you watch the 1971 film version by Roman Polanski, in which the symbolic elements of the play are drawn out in staggeringly vivid ways.

Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is perhaps less well known (despite “Faustian pact” being a common idiom), although in 2016 the Duke of York Theatre in London put on a sublime production of it starring Kit Harington which did something to revitalise interest in the play. This iconic work portrays a magician who makes a deal with the devil: his soul for 27 years of unlimited power. It is an extremely Gothic work, with its magical rituals, sexual undertones, metaphysical discourse, spirits, demons and religiosity. If you can find a good version of this play, I’d highly recommend it. The language is challenging, but once you get into it, this barrier will fall away.

These plays were written towards the end of the sixteenth / beginning of the seventeenth century, and remain some of the most celebrated plays in any language to this day. How is it that they remain so potent, even now? And why do we hold onto these plays, when many of their contemporaries are now being forgotten? One answer, I believe, is in the nature of Gothic, and Horror, itself. Horror is perhaps the only genre defined by an emotion. It’s about feeling, powerful emotional response, and of course strong emotional reactions stays with us.

I would be remiss not to mention the great Mary Shelley, whose Victorian novel Frankenstein has become a benchmark for Horror and Science Fiction writers throughout the world, and is Gothic through to its bones. Again, the success of Frankenstein is not in clever plotting or even in its Horror, because there are scarier books. No, its success is in the emotional resonance of the ending, and realising that we have misjudged the “monster” all along. Sympathy is an integral part of Horror. We must sympathise with Macbeth, to understand the gravity of his errors, to feel his terror as the walls close in. We must sympathise with both Victor Frankenstein, the tortured rebel creator, and his creation, “the monster”, in order to learn a profound lesson at the end of Frankenstein.

Emotion is the key. As a reader, you read a Horror book to be scared, or at least repulsed. As a Horror writer, you aim to write a book that will haunt your readers. Stephen King said: “First, I’ll try to make you feel terror. If I can’t I’ll make you feel horror. If I can’t do that I’ll gross you out. I’m not proud”. These words, in a way, show three key forms of Horror. The empathetic (terror), which means we experience the emotions of the protagonist as our own. The sympathetic (horror), which means we feel sorry for, can relate to the protagonist and their predicament. The gruesome (disgust), which means we feel revulsion or are “grossed out”. All three are valid, and can be intermixed at will.

THE FOUR KEY ELEMENTS OF GOTHIC WRITING

So, I have listed some things that define Macbeth, Hamlet and Doctor Faustus as Gothic texts. However, this is all a bit vague. I’m now going to narrow it down to the four key elements that define a text as Gothic, and how these “serve the beam”, to quote Stephen King once more. When you understand how each of these four elements work, and how they work in cohesion, you will be able to look at classic Gothic literature, such as Macbeth, Hamlet, Doctor Faustus, Frankenstein, Dracula, Jane Eyre or even modern Horror texts for that matter, and see how these elements have been used. What’s more, you’ll be able to use them yourself to create a Gothic piece. This is not to say that all the writers I have listed are thinking about the genre in this way, they probably don’t, but I believe there are mechanics beneath the surface that writers pick up subconsciously from years of study and internalisation.

MOOD

Dean Koontz said many faults in a writer could be forgiven if they could “weave a warp and weft of mood”. Gothic is about atmosphere: how do we feel stepping into the haunted castle, or walking through the woods alone, or seeing the seductive vampire? One technique for creating mood is sense. Most writers focus only on one, vision, so they spend hours laboriously describing their scenes, as though their novel/story were a transcript of a movie. Think deeper. What are the sounds, smells, sensations?

ARCHITECTURE

This works in two ways:

Literal

The first location described in Macbeth is Macbeth’s imposing fortress home which sits upon a high hill overlooking a forest: “This castle hath a pleasant seat”. You can immediately see parallels with the later novel The Castle of Otranto, where the setting of the ‘castle’, and its labyrinthine mazes, becomes symbolic of the labyrinthine mind of Lord Manfred and his schemes. In Dracula, the first quarter of the novel is set in Dracula’s keep, and we even return there at the end. Dracula also has another castle in London which becomes his base of operations.

Structural

Most Gothic literature is structured in elegant and baroque ways. For example, in Frankenstein, we have the ‘framed narrative’ device, going deeper and deeper into the story through different lenses. In Dracula, we have the epistolary device, the story told through various letters. A fabulous modern Horror story that uses ‘architecture’ in a compelling way is ‘The Woman in the Hill’ by Tamsyn Muir, a short story recently re-published in Best of Horror 2016. This used an epistolary device to create a sense of verisimilitude.

You maybe asking ‘what is verisimilitude?’

Think about the plethora of recent Horror films using the ‘found footage’ trope. This is the cinematic equivalent of a letter, because the story is being posed as authentic and coming from one authentic source. These kinds of structures have evolved in one sense from the early Gothic ‘epistolary’ novels, but also have remained bizarrely consistent for hundreds of years. Walpole’s novel The Castle of Ortranto was released, posing as a real translation of an Italian manuscript found in a crypt. Only later did he reveal the truth. This is Gothic verisimilitude. The supposition of believability. Narrative architecture in Gothic literature can be used to create this sense of believability in order to draw your reader deeper into the maze of your story.

The title of this seminar: The Cathedral of the Deep, comes from the video-game Dark Souls, which is created by Japanese game-developer Hidetaka Miyazaki. The Cathedral of the Deep is a location the player can explore which is said to house the remains of the god-eating monster Aldlich, Lord of the Deep, who’s actually a kind of viscus sludge. The Cathedral itself is full of gorgeous paintings, golden braziers, candles, statues, gargoyles (some of which come alive and attack you), undead, maggot-ridden creatures that thrash in pools of blood, and also, invading spirits from other worlds, ghosts, and a fanatical cult of archbishops. Miyazaki is clearly a big fan of the Gothic – he revealed in an interview he read many English Gothic and Fantasy writers in his youth, though he struggled to translate them – and the worlds he creates are based on Western Gothic and medieval traditions, even if they do have a Japanese twist to them.

Here architecture is reflected in the artistic game and level design, as well as the elliptical storytelling. “The Cathedral of the Deep” is, I believe, a perfect encapsulation of the Gothic. The Cathedral represents architecture, structure, design, trappings, style. The Deep represents deeper meanings, what’s buried beneath, desires, emotions. Bear these two concepts in mind when you begin to write your Gothic fiction. What is the external architecture of your piece? Are you writing it as a letter, or a journal, or is it rather that the setting is baroque and magnificent? Then, what are the underlying emotions? Often the degraded emotions of Gothic protagonists contrast with the splendour of their surroundings.

RELIGION

All Gothic literature is spiritual in some way, or else, extensively utilises the mythos and trappings of religion. This is linked to the architecture. Often, the Gothic uses religious structures as key focal points: cathedrals, churches, holy ground, or, metaphorically, internal religious structures of belief and faith.

This also includes deeper themes and questions of reality: who are we, where do we come from, what is reality?

A modern fantasy novel such as City of the Iron Fish (Simon Ings) captures this perfectly, where we go into the nature of existence by exploring this mysterious city, which slowly comes unravelled. When the hero tries to leave this city in the story, he eventually reaches a liminal barrier in the desert where everything fades into stick drawings – including the hero himself. This is a terrifyingly meta/fourth-wall breaking moment that reflects Gothic ideas.

Modern cinema uses religion too. Alien, apparently a simple survival tale, is steeped in religious questions. There is evidence of a master-race that creates both the human race and the xenomorphs – therefore exploring the origin of our species. The more recent films, whilst not a patch on the original (for lack of mood I’d wager), go into the questions of what constitutes humanity, intelligence, love, connection, morality and much more through the character of David (played by Michael Fassbender). In addition, the xenomorphs’ home planet is presented as a cipher for Hell itself.

Madness is also linked to religion in the Gothic, because madness was, in the past, suggested to represent a deeper connection to God. For, how could God’s will and power be understood by a sane person? So, madness, and how it de-constructs the architecture of normal life, is a common theme of the Gothic. The novels of Christa Wojciechowski explore madness and perception in extremely Gothic ways, and are well worth reading.

You might ask the question: ‘Could a Gothic novel be written without religious elements?’ I hate to be prescriptive, so my final answer is ‘Maybe’. However, I’d argue it would be almost impossible. The novel, Hidden People, attempted to do this quite ambitious, but sadly, for me, it was not quite successful.

LYRICISM

Last but not least. The language of Gothic literature is often elevated and poetic. Frequently, throughout the history of Gothic literature, poetry and prose are blended. Think of Horace Walpole’s sonnet introducing The Castle of Otranto, the works of Edgar Allan Poe (Fall of the House of Usher in particular), the poetry of Percy Shelley, Byron (the poem ‘Darkness’ perhaps the most Gothic poem ever written), and, of course, Shakespeare and Marlowe’s plays. There’s a sense of richness and beauty to the language essential to contrast and juxtapose with the horror. If you want a modern example, the short stories and novels of Richard Thomas, in particular something like Tribulations, perfectly strikes a balance between Horror and beauty.

SUMMATION

The acronym for these elements is M.A.R.L. and the way I remember it is: Marlborough Reds, the cigarette brand. It’s easy to remember because ‘red’ is a key Gothic colour: red is the colour of desire, blood, and red and black are the colours of death. The red lips of the seductor, the red eyes of the vampire. Red is also the colour of sexually transmitted diseases: red spots on the genitals, face or hands. Sexually transmitted diseases are another key Gothic theme (Dracula is arguably an allegory of about STDs), because they imply the taboo, transgression. Transgression ties in with religion as one of the four key elements of Gothic.

Exercise 1.

Now, we’re going to do some practical work to exercise our creative muscles and see how we can use this theoretical knowledge. Pick your favourite Horror film, story, book, whatever. Write down the four key elements as headings, and then, beneath those headings, list all the elements that fit into these categories. Some elements may even fall into more than one. For example, the creepy setting of a graveyard (which evokes mood) also has a specific layout, which becomes plot-integral later, therefore this graveyard is also part of the architecture of the piece. This example is from Stephen King’s story “Graveyard Shift” if you hadn’t guessed already! Try to write a few of these, see what elements really appeal to you, and think about how you might subvert their usage for your own tales.

Thank you so much for coming this far. I hope that this class has been of use to you. We’ve now reached the end of Part 1, where we’ve closely examined “What Gothic Is”. In the next class, we will look in more depth at “How To Write It”. Specifically, in Part 2, we will cover: writing a five act structure synopsis for our story, writing a compelling opening, writing a first paragraph, and more!

Until next time, my friends!

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Good News for a Change: The Short Story is Reborn!

2017 was a remarkably challenging year. However, despite the challenges of difficult socio-economic circumstances, political warmongering and the continual disintegration of values in our society, the artistic and beautiful still managed to triumph and blossom. I don’t maintain utopian ideals. I do not believe humans are perfectible or that government or law can fix the issues that stem from our human condition, but I do believe that there is a glimmer of hope, and that hope is what we must hold onto in 2018.

I believe one of the greatest of these glimmers in 2017 was revitalisation of the short story form in the UK. The short story has long been neglected by writers and publishers here, whereas it is still held in high esteem in the US, often viewed as a kind of ‘rite of passage’ by which authors can win accolades and critical acclaim before they go for the big novel pitch. There are far more markets in the US for the short story form as well as anthologies collating the best of specific genres. The ‘Best American’ literary series epitomises this outlook, treating the short story much in the same reverence as the sonnet of Elizabethan England, whereby a writer could not really claim to be a poet unless they had written one.

But even in the US, the short story has been in danger for a while now. More and more markets are starting to close and many newer markets are not able to offer professional paying rates. Publishers put out fewer single-author short story collections each year. Extremely long-standing and well-reputed markets remain open, of course, such as Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Shimmer, and Analog. However, this creates issues in and of itself, because these markets are so prestigious many new writers feel they represent pipe-dream ambition. With diminishing opportunities, a greater number of authors feel there is no point in writing short stories, as no one will publish them and no one will read them. It’s not the publishers’ fault by any means, but a result of economic, societal and philosophical changes, and these changes are far from over if the current political climate in the West is anything to go by.

But all is not lost, because there has been a miraculous recovery of the short story.

Firstly though, why is the short story so important? Well, I believe it is its very concision that makes it valuable. Writing is healing. We’ve known this for millennia. Writing is both therapy for the writer and reader, especially when it achieves the pre-eminent quality of inducing catharsis. Catharsis often comes at the end of a story, and the power of short stories is that they are endings and nothing else. Sure, there are structures and formulas and ways to de-construct them, but I honestly believe that the greatest short stories are the ones that feel like walking into the end of a movie, where everything is rich with meaning but you do not have the full context. A good friend of mine once told me to watch the third season of Twin Peaks: The Return without first watching the original seasons 1 & 2. ‘It’ll add to the weirdness,’ he said. ‘And make it even better.’ Boy, was he right. Piecing together the missing history of the series in the implied dialogue and imagery was one of the most joyous aspects to watching that momentous television event of 2017.

So, the same is true of good short stories. You come into the movie with ten minutes left, and while you wonder what the hell it’s all about, you feel this cataclysmic swell of emotion that defies logic-driven attempts to fill in the gaps and create ‘plot’. With a short story, a good one, as with poetry, you get straight to the healing part without having to wade through plot and narrative mechanics. Of course, good novels and long-form narrative make the plot and narrative enhance the emotional experience, but that’s an essay for another time. I think this can be summed up best in the words of Dan Coxon, the editor of The Shadow Booth (more on this anon), in a recent interview with LitReactor: ‘There’s nothing better than a short story that evokes a strong emotional response in the reader but defies all attempts to pin it down.’

The tradition of short stories dates way back, as far and if not farther than Ovid, with his eclectic and electric collection of tales Metamorphoses, one of the books that most greatly influenced Shakespeare. The first time I personally realised the incredible potential of the short story was when I read a piece by Raymond Carver called ‘Are These Actual Miles?’. I would later learn Carver contributed to the revitalisation of the short story in the 80s. In this story, the state of a disintegrating marriage is symbolically represented by the condition of a car. This tale made apparent the power of the image to tell a story, without the need explain it with clunky narrative exposition. The naturalistic dialogue, and the way it created such a rich sense of character, was also a wake-up call to me, as hitherto I’d hardly used dialogue in my storytelling. After that, I was inspired by the ‘daughters of decadence’ – the astonishing female writers of the 19th century whose short stories are shining examples of stylistic excellence and emotional power. In particular, the works of Olive Custance (the featured image of this article in case you were wondering), Olive Schreiner, Victoria Cross and Charlotte Perkins Gillman. The often fantastic and phantasmagorical ideas of these writers were always nuanced and subtle, and deeply influenced my own approach to how Fantasy should be written. I later discovered Thomas Mann, Stephen King, and a sea of other phenomenal writers employing the short form.

Now we come to the present day, where many consider the short story redundant. Recently, a close friend of mine, having read one of my short works, smiled and said: ‘This is why I don’t read short stories. They frustrate me.’ He was annoyed, perhaps understandably, that I didn’t specify exactly what happened at the end. Did the characters live? Get blown up? I could see where he was coming from, but it also made me realise how little attuned we are as a culture to this form. Once, it was a mainstay, but somehow we’ve lost the beat of it. He somewhat admitted it himself, perceptively observing that the form had always ‘frustrated’ him. I wonder if schools put more emphasis on this form whether we would change things. But that is also a topic for another time. So much good work is being done in the short story field. For anyone new to the scene, or looking to fall in love with short stories, I would highly recommend the collection The New Black, published by Dark House Press; it represents a triumph of the short story form and this should come as no surprise given that the collection was collated by none other than Richard Thomas, whose own single-author short story collection Tribulations was a master-stroke. I’ve praised this collection in numerous places, so I won’t re-iterate it here, but suffice to say Richard Thomas is one of the best advocates for the short story precisely because he wields it with such efficacy. Another collection for lovers of the Fantastic is Songs of the Dying Earth, which has stories from a number of prestigious authors including George R. R. Martin and Neil Gaiman. These stories, written in styles creatively imitating Jack Vance’s original ‘baroque’ prose, are inventive, zany and profoundly weird, some of the best speculative fiction I’ve read in a long time.

Gamut magazine, another Richard Thomas innovation, spearheaded an incredible movement to create a quality neo-noir zine. And though, tragically, it will not be going forward into a second year (the take up was not significant enough), the quality of stories it offered, and the number of new voices it discovered, has set the bar exceedingly high for all time. You might think it strange I’m spending time in my ‘hopeful’ essay with an example of a short story market that is no longer running, but Gamut demonstrated that with a clear vision for quality, and aesthetic taste, it was possible to create something unique and beautiful. Whilst it did not gain enough of a following to continue, it set an example, reinvigorating the literary community, particularly in the realms of Speculative and Horror fiction, with a thirst for quality short fiction. I certainly found myself feverishly logging in to the Gamut website during my lunch-breaks at work in order to read the latest article or story. I find it hard to remember the last time I had such a hunger for literary content.

In the UK, we are beginning to cotton on, and new short story markets have emerged. My own effort, 13Dark, clawed its way into existence, introducing three new voices in fiction. What’s unique about 13Dark is that it focuses on longer short stories, those tricky pieces of fiction that fall between the arbitrary boundaries of 5,000 words or less, or 20,000 or more. These longer forms achieve tremendous power and impact precisely because of their added depth and complexity (but they still retain the poetic concision of the short form). I’ve always been a fan of the ‘long short story’ – and it was a delight to showcase such shining examples of it. There will be more from 13Dark in the future, so watch this space.

Perhaps more significantly, STORGY and The Shadow Booth released their début publications last year. STORGY’S epic 24 story collection Exit Earth is a tour de force, treading a dividing line between literary and genre, writing both timelessly about issues of power and humanity whilst also screaming into the present with commentary on the state of technology and contemporary socio-political issues. The Shadow Booth Vol. 1 is a profound exploration of Weird fiction and like 13Dark explored longer story forms. There were many incredible contributions to this collection, notably Daniel Carpenter’s ‘Flotsam’ and Richard Thomas’ ‘White Picket Fences’. I had the incredible fortune to have stories in both volumes, and attended both launch-events in London (they were on consecutive days!). The energy at these events was awe-inspiring (you can check out pictures of the STORGY event here), and there was a real feeling that the short story was once again attaining capturing interest. The fact so many upcoming writers are contributing to the form, alongside more established names, shows that people still thinks there is value in it, and that new ideas can still be expressed within its constraints.

Theodore Dalrymple once said in his seminal work Our Culture, What’s Left of It: ‘Art is precisely the means by which man makes sense of, and transcend, his own limitations and flaws’. While it might sound lofty, I think it’s most probably true. The short story is a particularly effective way to do this because it is not onerous to write – it can be completed in a few sittings, and refined and refined at leisure. I would argue that in our increasingly time-restricted culture, where we are asked to work more and more with less personal development time, the resurgence of the short story is not just timely and convenient, but a complete necessity for literature to continue to thrive, and therefore, for people to continue to thrive, because good writing heals us, good writing imparts understanding and empathy, good writing is the antidote to total corporate anaesthetisation.

So what are you waiting for? Go write.

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Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this article, please feel free to follow @josephwordsmith on Twitter, or alternatively discover more about 13Dark on their Facebook page. To discover his writing, you can check out his work at Amazon.

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To celebrate the re-emergence of the short story, I’m offering 15% off 13Dark’s first issue: DEAD VOICES. Follow this link, and use the code JAN15 to at checkout.

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