Salem's Lot and Half of a Yellow Sun

Vampires. No radioactive cows. Maybe a ghost and a portal of evil. But mostly vampires. I enjoy a classic vampire story. Let me clarify: I enjoyed Dracula and its queasy Romantic-Gothic sexuality. In a sense, Salem's Lot is a classic vampire movie in that it climbs the same brickwork, but it has dirt on the soles of its shoes and it arrives at the wrong window: that of the servants, who make dull vampires.

The title is promising: Salem's Lot. The witch trials, the drownings, the burnings - and the contemporary knowledge that this is where supposed witches were burnt to death because some fools got syphilis and needed  a scapegoat. We also know that supposed witches are a vengeful bunch who come back to pull out the hair of innocent people. So we begin with that stomach-clenching anticipation. Not only are there no ghosts, there are no witches. No animal familiars, not even an animated broomstick or dancing mice.

I am bored already by this topic. You? Which is My Point (We got here faster than usual. Which is not necessarily a bad thing.) Stephen King is a master of his craft. His plot structure, use of characters, foreshadowing and resolution are precise. Which is, again, My Point. His prose carries you along until you find you are already finished (well, kinda). But the foreshadowing hits you in the face like a hand in a boxer's glove, which is delivered by the characters, who (imaginatively speaking) look like Rocky. In other words (if you are struggling to concentrate, too), the story is predictable. Almost (I can hear you shouting objections already) predictable.

From the 1931 film Dracula

The topic is also promising. Vampires are modelled on Vlad the Impaler, who was a piece of work, easily one of the most evil men of all time. Even a cleaned-up version is sickening: the man literally had people impaled, feet to head, for entertainment. Because he was (let's review this ) evil. More evil than a town of vampires or a squadron of Nazis. A thoroughbred psychopath. Even I would rather believe in supernatural evil, not human evil, so I can begin to understand this level of bad. I crave some moral boundary to shove him behind; I need to know that he and his ilk could be vanquished and sent to suffer for their actions for eternity. Which is perhaps where the vampire legend comes from.

Now you are wishing I had not even written than blurb on Vlad's hobby, right? You are also wishing I would continue. Either way you are still reading. Because holding hands with your horror is your death instinct. You know the drill: that we watch movies like Scream and Saw to confront our own mortality. Because we all subconsciously assume we are immortal (don't argue, you - in a simple, childish argument, even denying it proves it) partly because who could live every day with immediate knowledge that we are dying? When we watch movies like Saw, we spend the first hour or so dancing with the knowledge that we could die any moment, and the second hour calmed because someone perseveres and survives, and that someone is metaphorically us.

(Personally, I don't watch movies like Saw because I can't bear the idea that people would maim each other, nevermind enjoy, nevermind imagine these scenarios. The thought of it literally makes me ill. But zombies... I get that.)

Now here is where the promise of the title is really mangled. (I am trying to restrain myself from making glittery jokes, because they're so easy, but feel free to make your own and not tell me about it.)  Salem's Lot was written in the '80s, roundabout Lost Boys and then Blade. Its vampires are the lost-soul and replaced-by-pure-thirsty-evil sort. They need to be staked, not understood. For all other similarities with Dracula, this lot of vampires lacks the lust of its father figure, which makes this version vapid. Isn't that the point of the vampire legend? Repressed female sexuality? (Read Dracula and get back to me.)

I followed this up with Chimanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, as I promised. It is set during the Nigerian civil war of the 1960s - far more frightening than Dracula but on par with Vlad. For me, it echoes the traumas of the more recent Rwandan crisis, which has always disturbed me. As it should, but perhaps more than it should. My conscience cannot understand - not even if you convinced me that half of the population fell ill with the vampiric illness. Please try. I would much rather believe in supernatural evil, than that there is more than a one per cent chance my neighbours could be convinced that I deserve to die, because someone calls me a cokroach or by virtue of some incidental thing like my dialect or accent or clothing, .

Toni Morrison (I am really cramming everything in to this post) wrote that trauma cannot be transcribed; it is a great bawling absence - see, I am already running short of words. This is how she writes (or doesn't write) about trauma in her novels: by writing 'around' it. EM Forster did the same thing in Passage to India, when the main character suffers a nervous breakdown. Adichie (who is influenced by Morrison's work - she's like the Dickens of modern literature) gives trauma her own spin. She describes elements of the trauma matter-of-factly.

(I am about to get kind of juvenile Vlad here, so read on at your own peril.)

One character is evacuated via a train cart like a cow to slaughter. Next to (leaning on) her is a woman with her daughter's head in a pot - we can only assume it was soldiers with knives not bombs. Adichie describes how ashen the girl's skin in, as if it were dabbed in powder. Adiche refers back to this moment often but never with any overt judgement.

The same character finds her way home to her husband and child, but suddenly cannot walk. Her legs just fail as if a nerve has been severed. She has to be carried everywhere, instead. Again, Adiche presents this to us matter-of-factly, as she might a dinner conversation or visit to the market. Trauma isn't contained in time - it spreads out laterally into innocuous events like shopping for food. It can't be confined to memory, temporal space, even emotion. It is processed in some parts of the brain but not others.

There is also a slight thrill to reading a story with macabre mystery. Our death instinct gleefully steps up again. You are alive and dying, it says. As if death has a quota, you have seen death and been spared. You are human; you are special; you will live for ever.

© Semiotic apocalypse, via http://semioticapocalypse.tumblr.com/: Biafran soldier during Nigerian civil war circa 1967

Full Dark, No Stars

Until now, all I knew of Stephen King were his writings about, well, writing. Specifically, On Writing. Even of that book, I have read only excerpts. So, what I knew about Stephen King was limited to what advice I wanted about my own craft. 'Life's too short,' I thought. But no, it isn't. Life is very long, years long, and 'if not, why not' (a saying I use often because it is technically meaningless but pithy).

First I picked up Full Dark, No Stars. (Well, I opened it on my Kindle app on my phone.) Short stories, for my short attention span. There are four (not so short) stories in the book. What I expected from Mr King was knife-like suspense, punch-like action and trite morals. What I received was mostly dusty foreshadowing, fleshy characters and some of my own, justified anger. You know me, this is neither here nor there (another of my beloved and lovely statements).

For his next birthday, I am going to send Mr King a sock filled with coins. The sock will have a tag saying 'Foreshadowing' and the instructions will say to use it next time he is setting up his stories for us. Then he can spend the remaining 4% of his effort in surprising us. Maybe horror stories aren't meant to be surprising. Maybe the joy of reading a Stephen King is the closure. But no, horror is meant to be surprising. Like when Dracula lives - unlives - even after Buffy stakes him three times.

The first story '1922' reminded me of Freud's Rat Man. This man was tortured by something most people don't think about, until some movie or story prompts them to, and they talk about it over coffee or beer, and then they forget about it while hunting for change to pay for parking. He was obsessed with the idea that something he did or thought would have ramifications for the people he loved. He obsessed over a stone in the road, because it could be the stone that broke the wheel of the wagon his love was travelling in. But if he moved it, he could actually be ensuring that that was what it was. He was stuck between seemingly irrelevant choices, which all seemed fateful.

The man's pseudonym came from his primary obsession: that his family would suffer a torture involving rats in a cage  attached somewhere on your body, which would obviously eat their way through you to get out. Obviously. He worried that just thinking it would cause the torture to be inflicted on the ones he loved. The notion itself seems fairly normal to me, folks, especially if you consider 'positive thinking' and 'send this email to 10 people or you will be cursed' messages. Or is truth relative, in which case my point still holds.

The crazy is in the obsession, right? (The thought-provoking torture method aside.) In nit picking every choice in your life, even the innocuous ones. Picking up a stone in the road, to save your loved one, in fact causing their death. Free will versus reality versus morality and intention. I dunno. To me, crazy is in not thinking about this at all.

As I write, my bunny is refashioning my jersey and pants into a shelter, occasionally nipping me in the process. Darnit, she's so cute, I can't stop her. Death, free will, resignation. I call that Sunday lunch.

This theme rings through each of the four stories. In '1922', a man premeditatively kills his wife with the aid of their son. He is haunted not by her but by the rats that are the last thing he sees when he fills in her resting place. 'Big Driver' is about a woman who is raped and left for dead (go, girl). 'Fair Extension' is what I associate with Stephen King: a man 'steals' his best friend's success through voodoo. 'A Good Marriage' is about what a wife does when she finds her husband's guilty pastime.

They are all about choice.

They are also filled with rats. Rats being the foreshadowing - literally, in the first story - like the sock filled with coins. The choices (and choice) are laid out in the first few paragraphs, and if you read between the lines (har!), that's it. That's the story. These characters aren't considering their options, choosing how to shake the hand of fate, choosing what they will be wearing, how they will smile, where they will be. They are justifying a decision they made at the very beginning of the story, asking you to be their alibi.

If I say to you now, oh no, I can hear the rats skittering behind me, literally and metaphorically, what do you think is going to happen? Are we going to play My Little Ponies or are they going to chew through my arm simply to stop me from typing? And if I post it once an hour for three days (with my other arm) on Facebook? That, my friends, is a Stephen King story.

As usual, I didn't hate these stories. The premises were interesting and the moral ambiguities more interesting. But I do not like to be manipulated, especially if I can see the hands moving the strings. Mr King's biggest strength is the empathicness of his characters. Whether or not I like the character or their choices, I understand them. I can even see how those types of choices are ingrained in our natures: survival of the fittest, schadenfreude, vanity, revenge.

Mr King posts signs at every exit, but they are lies - none of them really go anywhere. Our characters have made their choices. The rest of the stories are just the kind of posturing your best friend's new boyfriend or girlfriend makes when meeting you for the first time. They want your vote when it comes down to them or your best friend's ex. Even if they're pulling out that person's hair and groping for a murder weapon.

I am bitter, but I am also reading Salem's Lot. I wrote this post to convince myself something unexpected is going to happen. But no, it's vampires, isn't it? Not a bunch of marrow-sucking pygmies, real-estate agents or radioactive cows? Please be radioactive cows.