30 Days of Night – Steve Niles, Ben Templesmith

           30 Days of Night introduces a vampire tale in a graphic medium. The plot is simple. The small Alaskan town of Barrow experiences a polar winter every year lasting thirty days, and a vampire baddy named Marlow decides to cash in on the opportunity and orchestrates a month long feeding frenzy for twenty of his kind. A few individuals survive the initial frenzy and hide, but soon their food stores run low and it is apparent they won’t survive to see the sun at the rate things are going. The town sheriff, Eben sacrifices himself, and injects blood from an infected citizen to turn himself into a vampire and uses his new strength to destroy the vampires. And then he decides to watch the sunrise with his wife and end his existence before he entirely loses his humanity.

            The graphic novel is under a hundred pages long. Even with an incredibly simple plot, I think the story suffers for its brevity. The title of the work is 30 Days of Night. Thirty days of the vampire apocalypse in total darkness, cut off from the outside world, starving and freezing, might as well be an eternity. The narrative doesn’t do justice to the situation. The entire month is glossed through with a vampire killing montage. The entire day to day struggle of the survivors is lost, with all of their fear, despair, and grief. The novel spends more time on the set up than it does on the event, and even the resolution. I felt an emotional disconnect from the story and characters. The only panel that got to me was the last one, when Eben and his wife watch their last sunrise.

            That said, the vampires in 30 Days of Night have a unique feel to them, partially contributed through their characteristics, and partially due to the art style. These vampires are intelligent, but have clearly lost their humanity. They lack the seductive grace and refinement of the modern vampire and instead exhibit bestial savagery, and overwhelming hunger. The muted colors and sketchy style of the art, though confusing at times, gives a gritty, hardboiled feel to the beasts. They are primitive, not in intelligence, they clearly have higher reasoning powers, but in their mentality. Most of the vampires are completely driven by their most base desire to feed above all else. The artistic focus on teeth and wide, gaping mouths drives the endless hunger of the monsters home, and their glossy black eyes robs them of humanity. These vampires are not tormented by their fallen state, or haunted by memories of the past. They are clearly new beings, completely disjoined with whoever they were in life.

            In some ways, the 30 Days of Night vampires reminded me more of the Wendigo from Algonquian myth; a terrible spirit of hunger and cannibalism, that feeds and feeds but is never satiated. I enjoyed these vampires because the theme of insatiable hunger is one I enjoy in horror. It drives the monsters with limitless motivation, robs the prey of any hope of respite, and dehumanizes the survivors at the same time, degenerating them into so much meat, blood and bone. That level of dehumanization is frightening in many ways, because it forces people to look at the reality of their mortality. We are meat. All of the intelligence, emotion, dreams, and soul of our existence is no assurance that we will ever be more than meat when we die.

            Ironic that the immortal vampires of 30 Days of Night can embody the fear of ultimate human mortality. 

Rawhead Rex- Clive Barker

           I loved Rawhead as a monster. He was a real monster in its purest form, as Rawhead at his core, is a force of nature. He was the physical embodiment of the most monstrous things, rage, hunger, destruction, and unlike many other monsters (which are monstrous in a very different way) Rawhead is completely devoid of humanizing characteristics. Rawhead is not a monster that can be reasoned with, and he is not a monster that can be changed. He is as he always was. He is exactly as he was created.

            Some of the specific details that made this beast so effective.

            Rawhead was created out of centuries of mythology and folklore. Rawhead, and the other names he was known by, comes to us out of generations of European oral tradition. The monster is ancient (both in the story) and in human history. Because of this, even in this new rendition of the creature, Rawhead had a definite authenticity about him. Rawhead is not a monster that will be scaring us for an hour as we read through Barker’s short story, but rather, Rawhead is a monster that has been scaring us since early history. Our ancestors cowered in their huts and villages, listening to the wolves and wind in the dark, surrounded on all sides by enormous stretches of untamed wilderness, and they believed this beast was out there. There is something deeply disturbing about a monster that was truly believed to exist. If only in the minds of our ancestors and frightened sixteenth century children, Rawhead was real.

            We were privileged to Rawhead’s POV. This is an element that I always love in stories, whether the monster is a sympathetic evil or not. Rawhead is not. When we get into Rawhead’s, erm, raw head, we see beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the inside matches the outside. Rawhead is the violence and destruction he brings. He has no deeper motive for it, and where in some cases this makes for a poorly drawn character, in this case it solidifies the monster. As a pagan god, and possibly the product of pure belief, Rawhead is the physical manifestation of destruction. The monster never ponders on why he does what he does, he is what he does. This served to heighten the sense of unstoppable power Rawhead possesses as a force of nature.

            Now that I’ve gone on about why Rawhead is a good monster, I’ll mention the reasons I also found him to be a likeable monster.

            I liked Rawhead. Really, I did. I actually liked Rawhead more than any of the other characters in the story. Now, there is a distinction between like, in the Rawhead sense, and like in a protagonist or antihero sense. Rawhead is the villain, and will always be the villain. He is horrible, and does horrible things, but Rawhead also has these tiny details that make me enjoy him while I'm waiting for someone to kill the bastard.

            Rawhead is out of his time. He’s been imprisoned beneath the earth for ages, and in that time the world he knew has passed. He emerges to find his vast wilderness kingdom gone and replaced with paved streets and metal boxes that make terrible noises and stink. There is a sense of loss there, not for Rawhead, but for the time that birthed him. The world was once a truly wild place, where the forces of nature held sway, and humans where the pathetic worm-like creatures without big teeth or claws, that had to huddle by the fire to survive. The world held places of deep shadow and darkness. The world held true terror, the unknown. Rawhead is the monstrous child of a world that died long ago, under the plow, concrete, and written word. I feel something for that. When in his head and seeing this world, new to him, I always feel a sab of loss with the terror. That gave just enough variability to what I felt for the monster, to heighten the dread of his main attributes, and make me like him.

            Ok, and maybe he reminded me of Grendel. An R-rated, soulless, distilled evil, version of Grendel. 

Breeding Ground - Sarah Pinborough

            Firstly, I want to thank Pinborough for the image of the partially eaten aborted three month fetus on the kitchen tile, I will never be able to scrub it from my brain. I'm not afraid of spiders, but I am afraid of parasites, and just the thought of pregnancy makes me nauseous (both the normal and evil spider-baby varieties) so Breeding Ground definitely had me squirming at parts. In the category of queasy images, Breeding Ground takes the gold.

            Breeding Ground, unlike I Am Legend, also had the characters going for it. They weren’t particularly deep, but they weren’t alarmingly terrible. They were comfortable, like most archetypes, and they moved the story forward. Katie was annoying, but she was also like twenty one, so I tolerated her existence. Unlike with Robert Neville, I was comfortable with Matt as a POV character and main protagonist, I'm not going to espouse love for him, but he got the job done, and I hurt for the guy in most of the right places.  

            However, there is a rant coming.

            What the hell is up with the hack scientists?! The one thing that will get me every time in anything with a science fiction element, is science that does not hold water. I get that it is science fiction, but if you are going to spit in the face of every natural law we know, your characters at least need to have a “holy crap, this is physically impossible!” moment, or else I think the characters, or worse, the writer is just stupid. Chloe doesn’t eat for a week and continues to gain an incredible amount of weight. You can’t make matter from nothing folks! Someone, anyone, in the novel, please be as alarmed as I am at this violation of the law of conservation of mass! When she stops eating, she becomes a closed system. Nothing is being added. That can’t come out of nowhere. And if it does, because fiction is awesome like that, someone please recognize this law and freak out a little!

            Then as the apocalypse grows in the vast majority of women all over the world, I am asked to believe that all of the doctors, scientists, and even the Joe’s in the world simply throw up their hands at this phenomenon and decide to wait and see. Everyone in the world, unanimously, decides to wait and see. WHAT? Someone put that chick in an MRI! Does her weird budding powers cause the electronics to malfunction? Exploratory surgery baby! We find out from Chris’s autopsy of Katie that the fatty lumps are different parts of the spiders developing around the body, which will contract and assemble in the womb shortly before birth. How hard could it be for a doctor to slice open one of those lumps, pull out a partially developed arachnid limb, and conclude Houston, we have a problem.

And speaking of Chris. Ah Chris. I am not a geneticist, nor am I a doctor, but I am confident anyone infected with a horrifying spider baby would fare better in my care, than in the care of Chris, the brilliant geneticist. When John discovers he has developed the telltale lumps of a widow infection, brilliant Dr. Chris fist suggests that they might just go away. Right. Because we have every reason to believe now, of all times that massive sporadically appearing lumps are more likely to go away than turn into a horrible spider baby. When John refuses to accept the all to prevalent “wait and see” policy of the many hack scientists who caused the apocalypse, Chris’s only other suggestion is to drink a pint of the deaf girl’s blood.

By the way, deaf people’s blood kills the spider things.

Moving on. Drink the deaf girl’s blood. Why would a geneticist suggest he drink the miracle blood? Does he not know what human stomach acid does to DNA and proteins? Inject that stuff! How about right into the lumps! If they’re not the same blood type, don’t inject enough to kill him! But no. Drink the blood and then we’re done. Shockingly, this does not work and an evil black boy spider bursts out of John’s head and kills him. And I liked John too.

Perhaps more motivation was needed to spark the creativity of this doctor. Nearly every other man in the group develops the lumps shortly after. Though I am assured Chris is doing everything he can to save himself and his comrades, I'm fairly certain he just decides to roll over and die, because I can come up with a bucket of things to try that do hold some logic. More logic than drinking the deaf girl’s blood.

And here are the reasons why I am a better post spider apocalypse doctor than Dr. Chris, with logic to boot.

              1.      When John killed his mother by bludgeoning her to death, just a few hours or maybe even moments before the completed gestation of her monster spider baby, it also killed the spider baby in question. Ergo, we could try to stop the heart, and then resuscitate the host to see if it would be enough to kill the developing spider baby.

              2.      The environment is becoming increasingly tropical. It is even postulated that the widows are somehow controlling the weather. Ergo, the widows need a higher temperature to survive. Most organisms in fact, need a stable environment to incubate their young. Ergo, we could try to lower the core temperature of the host in an ice bath, to make the body unfavorable for incubating the young, and kill the developing spider baby.

               3.      Electricity does kill the suckers. Yes, the high voltage fence packs a lot more punch than what a human body can survive, but when the alternative is dying horribly as a spider baby erupts from your body, why not hit the host with a defibrillator a few times? Who knows, usually embryonic life forms are significantly more fragile than adults. Maybe it will kill the developing spider baby.

               4.      Hit that sucker with some Chemo. Chris even suggested the spiders were made from all of the genetically modified food messing with peoples’ bodies, causing them to grow these monsters. That sounds a lot like cancer. Wriggling, sentient, spider-cancer. If you kill enough cells from anything, it will die. Here’s hoping we nuke the developing spider parts before the host.

a.       Oh, don’t have any Chemo or enough medical equipment on site? Well the spiders don’t attack people who are carrying future spiders. You all have a shield of invulnerability. Go out, get the stuff, come back, and fix yourself people. Go now. Chop chop.

                5.      And last, but not least, good old fashioned surgery. Especially in the male hosts, the lumps of developing spider baby are centralized under the skin in their chest. Just under the skin. So close you can see it moving in fact. Get a scalpel and have at it! Even if you miss parts, if you pull enough limbs and organs out of anything, especially prenatal things, they will probably die. After all, the last amateur surgery, the amputation of an entire arm from the shoulder in a vet clinic, actually worked! Add a doctor and supplies, and I like those odds!

Yes, all of these measures are incredibly risky, but look at the alternative. Two characters even waste themselves. If you're going to waste yourself, waste yourself for science. Let us electrocute you a little first or chill you in an ice bath. Who knows, you could save lives.

One more thing and I’ll stop. What is up with that genius freakin dog? The dog waits in front of the gate for hours like it knows it’s going to be let in, makes best friends with the deaf girl like it knows they’re both deaf, and then in the end exercises an incredibly advanced form of morality when it decides that Nigel isn’t good enough for a bullet after what he’s done, and stops the others from shooting him so he can die slowly from a widow bite. The dog voted for vengeful punishment. Was the dog some new evolution in the canine species? Brought on by the same phenomenon that caused the widows? Were the widows somehow controlling it to use as an undercover agent? No, it’s just a deaf dog. What the hell!? You can’t have a genius dog, then not explain it! You can’t! It even decides to go with George to find his grandson in the end, because the genius dog knows he won’t make it on his own. What?! Why is no one alarmed by this?!

Some great images, some great moments, but a very sloppy apocalypse.

The Funeral - Richard Matheson

            Having just read I Am Legend, I could scarcely believe The Funeral was by the same author. I’m glad my first experience with Matheson was I Am Legend, because had it been The Funeral, I don’t think I would’ve known what to think. I saw almost every writing ‘rule’ that has been tormenting me since the beginning of my graduate study in writing, beaten, broken, gutted, stuffed and put on display. The writing was ludicrous, and yet still somehow effective. Perhaps it is because I went into the story knowing Matheson as an accomplished writer who could actually write, or perhaps it was effective because it was a comedy, and nod toward the nostalgic Universal Studios Monsters, I will never know. It was the literary version of the gloriously campy episodes of The X-Files and Supernatural.

            The Funeral goes a long way to showing how forgiving readers will be about the things they are fond of, and how fondness and nostalgia itself can be so transformative. Monsters like Dracula and the Wolfman began their lives as something genuinely terrifying. New things are always scary, because they are unknown, and it is human nature to fear what we don’t understand. But through constant exposure and adaptation the frightening becomes the fascinating, and fascination becomes familiarity, and familiarity becomes fondness. Now we can pull a chair up to the service of our beloved monsters of yesterday and have a good laugh and a good time with them, because we know them like family.

            Unfortunately for Morton Silkline, his universe is not so familiar with our beloved monsters, and his verbose terror and dread make for some intensely funny irony. In fact, Silkline himself fails to recognize that he is a character trope; the greedy funerary service provider, profiting from loss. Though there is nothing actually funny about the grossly profitable business of death and mourning, we can laugh at this funeral, because no one is actually dead or mourning, the miser is the fool, and money is a nonissue for the client.

            It’s not all fun and games though; I found an actually thoughtful moment with Asper’s musing over his lack of a proper send off. People have a pervasive belief that their funeral service is somehow reflective of how they were regarded in life, Asper does. This is the belief that makes the business of grief so profitable, yet when the actual service begins and rapidly goes to hell in a hand basket, it is because none of the guests particularly cared about the service. Actual funerals, are for the living, not the dead. Funerals are for the people in attendance, not the body in the casket. If the body were the only one who cared, well, there would be one less global industry.

            It makes you think of the exact way we are conditioned to think of death and dying, and of the constructs in place to help us mourn. The dead don’t care. Fancy caskets, lovely flowers, and stirring speeches are things the living do to feel like they can do something about the death of their loved one. That tiny illusion of power works wonders for the grieving process. It matters less that our loved one is completely beyond our reach if we feel like we can do that one last thing right by them, out of love. When we lay the body in the ground we tell our loved ones they are at rest, but rest is what we seek in that action. People need their illusions, funerals supply them, it’s very human, something Matheson’s monsters are not.