The Wolfman - Jonathan Maberry

            I love werewolves. Of all the monsters and supernatural creatures that abound in fiction, werewolves are my favorite. I love all kinds of werewolves, evil werewolves, insane werewolves, monstrous werewolves, tragic werewolves, romantic werewolves; the whole spectrum. Of all the readings for this class, The Wolfman was the piece that had me the most excited.

            It was terribly underwhelming.

            It was just meh. Maybe it was because Maberry’s piece is a novelization of a film, but there was something off about the work as a whole. I never got into any of the characters (the omniscient narrator contributed to this), I never got a chill or a laugh, I never felt any tension. The whole time I read I was painfully aware of the fact I was reading. I will now point out a few of the factors that contributed to my disappointment.

            This was a novelization of a classic film, which has been done a few times. I kept that in mind. I made myself at all times aware of the fact the work was supposed to follow the film. But even with this in mind, the whole thing read like a giant cliché. It felt like one dramatic cliché after the other. Mysterious stranger, gothic manor, widowed beauty, gypsy wise woman, all of it. When I read the scene with the mysterious Frenchman with the silver wolf’s head sword-cane, I groaned inside aw, I wonder what he’s gonna do with that. I knew it was supposed to be this way, and in the end it didn’t matter a bit. It bothered me anyway.

            Then there was the language. The novel was set in 19^th century Europe. The writing tried to emulate the gothic novels of the time, but it came out all clunky and weird. An actual 19th century gothic novel is easier to read, Wuthering Heights was smooth and quickly immersed me in the language and style. Not so with The Wolfman.

            And then there was the Wolfman itself. This beast was the universal studios monster, and clung to the cannon. Great. I love werewolves, but… it did not lend itself to writing well. Where we could see the torment and rage in the expression of the Wolfman in his many appearances in visual media, on paper I was beaten over and over again with a hundred kinds of “rage” and then bloodlust this bloodlust that. And The Goddess of the Hunt, The Goddess of the Hunt, The Goddess of the Hunt, RAHHHH!!! I get it!

            All of the scenes in the Wolfman’s POV evoked images of Hollywood B-movie gore. Every time someone got decapitated by the Wolfman’s claws I shuddered inside. I'm sorry, I don’t care how strong the beast is, I just don’t see that happening unless his claws are ten inches long and sharp like a battle ready katana. And then there was the one severed head that tried to scream. Ugghhhh. I couldn’t take it seriously. It was like the novel was making a parody of Lawrence’s devastating struggle.

            The idea of the Wolfman style monster is potentially terrifying. The beast kills and eats, kills and eats, dozens, hundreds if it could catch them. It’s never full, it will kill, begin to feed, and then be distracted by the next fleeing morsel. The Wolfman is a nightmare of gluttony and excess in the most violent of ways. And it is virtually indestructible. The monster’s body eats lead bullets like they’re candy, and recovers from broken bones in seconds. The Wolfman also possesses just enough intelligence to make it more frightening than a beast, but not familiar like a man. Even more frightening is the potential for the Wolfman to be anyone. But for a few hours once a month, it could be your neighbor, your father, yourself. And on that one night each month whoever the Wolfman was doesn’t matter anymore. The transformation is irresistible, and total (barring a few seconds hesitation when faced with the power of love, awww). For me, the total loss of identity is the most frightening aspect of this monster. It kills a lot, so do other monsters, but the idea of being this monster is what is truly terrifying.

            But, alas, Maberry’s execution of this great idea didn’t do it for me.

            Yet, to end on a high note, there was one scene and one sentence that made me geek out in a good way. First is the scene. When the Wolfman enters the masquerade and is pacified by the blind soprano’s voice (yes, music lulls the beast is a trope, I know) I immediately recalled my beloved Grendel, torn apart by the Shaper’s poetry. It gets an A for making me recall Grendel.

            And now for the sentence. “Somehow his mass increased-perhaps drawing substance from Hell itself.”

            Thank you Jon. Thank you. Is that really so hard? Looking at you Pinborough.

Alien - Ridley Scott

This was my first experience with the Sci-Fi horror classic Alien. Yes, I am one of those people who saw Prometheus first, and yes, I enjoyed it. More importantly I also enjoyed Alien. Considering the film is from 1979, I was really impressed with the effects and filming techniques used to overcome the limited technology. I can count on one hand the number of scenes that looked disruptively hoaky, which is no small feat for a movie coming out of this time period. Many high budget modern horror flicks have failed to reach the level of tension I felt during key scenes in Alien.

            The first factor that contributed to the effectiveness of this film even decades later, is the cinematography. The film deliberately shied away from showing the alien in close up, well lit, and full detail. Instead the dark, claustrophobic, and inorganic aesthetic of the ship was reflected in the bits of the alien we were shown. As the film progressed, the setting and the monster seemed to blur until there was something hostile in every shot, even when the monster itself was nowhere to be scene. The feeling that the monster could be anywhere was more effective than actually having it pop up everywhere. In addition to the uncomfortable hostility of the setting, the parts of the monster that were shown with most detail were carefully selected to be the most dangerous and least human. The long glossy head, dripping double mouth, segmented tail, and perhaps the part I found most disturbing, the hands, which bore an unmistakable resemblance to human, but were corrupted, dark, wet, clawed things that moved with a disturbing fluidity in the scene at the end. In this way, the film drew attention away from the humanoid body of the monster (which was, in a few brief scenes, clearly a man in a suit) and kept the focus on the truly alien aspects of the beast.

            The second contributing factor to the success of this piece as a horror was the acting. I enjoyed the performance of every actor in the film. The screams were realistic; the growing terror in Lambert’s voice as she tells Dallas the alien is coming right at him was convincing. That scene was one of my favorites. There was something in the simplicity of the white blip on the radar marking the monster that served to heighten the terror, in the same way the static on your computer monitor makes you almost pee yourself when you play Slender. Weaver’s performance in particular struck me. Between her sweat drenched appearance, ragged breathing, and wide eyes, I felt anxiety with the character, who was also admirable and resilient to boot.

            The alien itself is an apex predator. It has multiple life stages, similar to many species of wasp. And like these wasps, each of the aliens life stages are terrifying, from the mouth-raping face-hugger, to the toothy little chest popper, to the fully formed adult (how did it get so big so fast anyway? What did it eat?).  Its blood is super corrosive, it’s incredibly adaptive, and it can probably eat four adult humans in less than twelve hours. On top of all that, it is also perfectly camouflaged with your claustrophobic spaceship.

            Oh, and there’s an evil android who’s most sinister quality is the level of ambiguity he operates in. for me, my inability to pin down how alike, or how unlike Ash was to humans made him particularly monstrous. He starts off seeming like he acted out of regard for Kane’s wellbeing (aw, how human), then we learn he only wants to preserve the alien and the humans are expendable (woah, how synthetic), and then right at the end he has that really uncomfortable scene where he tries to essentially orally rape Ripley to death with a rolled up nudie mag (WTF? What is up with this robot? Uncanny valley… *rocks*).

            In hindsight after conducting a little research, I’ve come to realize just about the entire Alien franchise is built upon the fear and horror of rape, but when first viewing the film, other than the obvious scene with the android, I was totally oblivious. I'm going to go ahead and keep the impression I had about the story of a tough girl, a scary monster, and a cat.

World War Z - Max Brooks

Officially my favorite piece so far, World War Z hit a level of depth and character the previous stories fell short of. I had my reservations coming into the piece, not being a fan of war stories, or stories with too many POVs, but by the end I was blown away by the novel. The strong voices really distinguish this piece from all of the others. Each interview reveals a POV ripe with culture, philosophy, and diversity in every way imaginable. This gives readers the chance to view the apocalypse from angles all over the globe and human spectrum, from suburban mom, to international space station astronaut.

For my favorite part.                      

I was majorly impressed by Brooks’ ability to create well developed characters in a handful of pages. So many of the characters came alive from the get go, but for me, the truly incredible feat revolves around my favorite character. General Raj Singh was a larger than life hero, and this fantastic image of him was built without ever giving him his own POV. The square he had is men form to fight off a zombie swarm became world famous, and was mentioned by many POV characters. The moment one of his men had to knock him unconscious to get him to evacuate the lost battle was viewed from space via satellite. His final moments were brought to us through a third party POV character who witnessed him run off to detonate the charges that would avoid a nuclear strike when the remote failed. Through the thoughts, eyes and ears of other characters, whether right in front of the General’s face, or literally a world away, Raj Singh was brought to life in a way that will stick with me even after many of the POV characters fade. This was one of my favorite parts of the novel, and really shows the power of characterization.

Now, about the zombies. The monsters in World War Z were an unstoppable plague that tore apart the planet. Science and technology were dreadfully underprepared for a disaster of this magnitude, and so were the social structures of every country. The book said it best, but to summarize, what made Zack so effective for me was that the monster’s destructive powers weren’t an inherent thing the creature possessed, but rather the exact way they combined with the faults of humanity. Another race, a better race, one more sophisticated, ethical, and united would never have succumbed to Zack the way humans did. The zombie is humanity turned against itself, both in the literal sense (zombies were people) and in the metaphorical sense (much of the devastation in World War Z came from people not getting along and doing things like launching nukes at each other.) I appreciate this poetic symmetry.

Another thing that really hit the spot with this work, was that it did the exact opposite of what many previous works earned my nerd rage for. World War Z acknowledged the scientific faults in it, and it made it more believable. Characters bring up both the fact that Zach somehow doesn’t rot in sea water, and the miraculous survival of the zombie’s brain tissue even after being frozen and thawed.  This made my nerd heart feel so warm. Thank you. Thank you for acknowledging the fact that science exists and should work, but doesn’t and no one knows why. That’s all I ever wanted.

The only thing I really found at fault with this piece is the lack of clarity in naming the different POV characters. The interviews are titled by location, and in many cases, the narrator’s opening narration leaves out the name of who he is interviewing. Though the voices were so strong I could usually tell when a repeat POV came up, it would have been nice to have the names readily available at the beginning of the POVs. Especially when you have to write a blog post. I don’t know the name of the Air force woman with the imaginary sky watcher “Mets” off the top of my head. And there are wonderful characters I can only refer to as Astronaut Man, Dog Man, and Resorted to Cannibalism Girl without pouring through the pages. They sound like bad superheroes.

But overall, World War Z has become a personal favorite. 

The Yattering and Jack - Clive Barker

So, I'm going to go ahead and out myself as a crazy cat lady because I'm going to talk about the cats in The Yattering and Jack a lot, but first…

This was a funny story. Out of all the nooks and corners of horror I’ve visited this semester, this was the first piece I can honestly say gave me chuckles. The Yattering was quite a character, a low level demon sent to torment Jack until breaking him and claiming his soul for hell. The only problem is Jack is all but impervious to every diabolical demon trick the Yattering can think of, and the poor fiend slowly starts to lose his mind when confronted with endless days of ineffective drudgery. I sympathized with the Yattering, far more so than Jack, because the Yattering’s story pretty much reflected my inner feelings about my time in the retail hell of Wal-Mart. Over worked, under paid and underappreciated hourly workers everywhere will be able to share in the demon’s suffering as he struggles to complete a near impossible task for a purpose his superiors won’t even share with him.

In comparison to the Yattering’s plentiful emotional outbursts, Jack left me cold. As the human victim of a demonic haunting, one would think Jack is the obvious protagonist. However Jack’s POV comes into the story very late, after I’ve already begun to sympathize with the demon, and Jack’s POV reveals that he is in fact playing the demon on purpose, and willfully risking the lives of his family and….

CATS.

The cat murdering is the only thing the Yattering did that felt truly villainous to me, though I will admit, the first murder was kind of funny. The Yattering just sort of scooped up the cat and threw it into the fireplace. And the way it is written makes it seem like the cat just sort of instantly turned to ash. Poof. Cats are very flammable.

Bad Yattering!

But then the real evil shows itself. Jack brings home another cat. A cat the Yattering drowns. Then Jack brings home yet ANOTHER cat. The Yattering blows this one up. Jack brought home two additional cats knowing the Yattering was going to murder them. Jack is a monster. I don’t really care that he brought his daughters home for the holidays and exposed them to the demon. They’re big girls, they can take care of themselves, they have thumbs, they can leave the house. But three defenseless cats, which in addition to murdering the Yattering tormented for quite some time… that is a level of coldness that chills me to the bone.

By the end of the story when Jack cements his clever victory over the demon, my final sentiment was “yeah, that’s right Jack. You don’t get to go to heaven you cat murderer.”

Also I think Yattering would make a good name for a cat. An evil cat that destroys your kitchen when you're not home, like the one I have. Then when you hear something break from the other room you can yell “knock it off Yattering!”

Plans. Big plans.