Dave's Anatomy: My History as a Writer #25: Horror and "Handy Man."

Pop music can inspire us in a lot of ways. I'm a musician and have written quite a few stories that derive from songs I liked or songs that intrigue me. Early on, when I was very much in the horror mode, I came up with a story based on the song "Handy Man," written in 1959 by singer Jimmy Jones and songwriter Otis Blackwell. It was a hit—not just once, but three times, first the Jones cut and then later in versions by Del Shannon and James Taylor. It always struck me as a little odd. The narrator claims to be a handy man that fixes broken hearts and says he's "busy twenty-four hours a day" with his task. He invites all the girls with broken hearts to run to him and then gives a sort of call-out (made especially famous by Del Shannon's falsetto voicing of it):  "Come-a Come-a Come-a Come-a Come Come-a Come-a—Yeh Yeh Yeh Yeh Yeh." It's been popular for some fifty years.

A couple of things got me thinking about it. For one, James Taylor's version of it is different because it sounds a little dark and sad. The other versions are exuberant, but Taylor's carries a gloomy undertone and ends abruptly and on a minor note. This intrigued me. Why did he choose to make the song sound a bit creepy? And songs can inspire the mentally unstable to do horrific deeds. The most egregious of these was the Charles Manson murders in 1969. Manson testified that he was convinced to kill actress Sharon Tate and six others by songs from the Beatles' White Album, "Helter Skelter" and "Revolution #9" among them. This got the imaginative wheels turning. What might a person with a psychopathic mind do with the odd and (in Taylor's version) dark lyrics of "Handy Man"?

"Handy Man" is the story of a guy inspired by the song and convinced he can fix broken hearts. The way he goes about doing this is destructive. It's a short story, about 1500 words (the closest I ever come to flash fiction). The unnamed narrator talks about being inspired by the song and relates two incidents in which he has fixed a broken heart.

The first one involves a girl who works at McDonald's and is being bullied by a classmate in high school. The narrator notices how this has broken the girl's heart, goes after the guy with a shotgun, and murders him during a rainstorm. He does not know the bullied girl at all but rejoices to see how her life changes for the better with the removal of her tormentor. He is careful to cover the crime and leaves town several months later.

In his next place of residence, he moves in with a girl name Luann and gets to know Tiffany, who goes by the nickname "Tiff." She is heartbroken after being dumped by a boyfriend. He thinks to murder the boyfriend, but decides that would only cause her more heartbreak. The solution: kill Tiff so her heartbreak will end. He is able to do this and successfully cover his crime. Soon he will go on to another town and look for another opportunity to fix a broken heart. The story ends  on this dark note:

Luann and I eventually split. I moved on, this time to Oregon. I’ve found a job. There is a girl who seemed forlorn. I’m getting to know her and she is beginning to confide to me.

I fix broken hearts. I know I really can.

Someone has noted that one of the main features of horror is when everyday things become sinister and threatening. A toy doll called TalkyTina and that is programmed to say, "My name is Talky Tina, and I love you," utters the chilling line, "My name is Talky Tina—and I'm going to kill you" in an old Twilight Zone episode;  a heart-shaped box unleashes a murderous ghost in Joe Hill's novel Heart-Shaped Box. In my story, a song loved by millions of people is taken as justification for murder. 

"Handy Man" can be read on line in the archives of Read Short Fiction.

A new novella about coffee to die for, Le Cafe de la Mort,is now available in Kindle from Amazon. 

For more titles, checks out my Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your comments.

Dave's Anatomy: My History as a Writer #22: Short Horror: You Are Here

Continuing to write horror, I tried to remember things that really scared me. When I grew up, one of the scariest shows on TV was The Twilight Zone. Now there were others. I remembered being frequently frightened by a program called One Step Beyond;  there were also Chiller and Thriller, regular prime-time shows that made me jump and want to sleep with the light on, but the Twilight Zone excelled them. That program was consistently scary.  

William Shatner in "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"

What was Twilight Zone horror like? It varied a lot. Not everything it had on was creepy. Some of the episodes, in fact, were funny. But there was what I would call a "brand" of horror that went with the show and that you saw consistently. It involved confusion. The protagonist in the story often did not know what was going on. Weird bizarre things took place and they baffled both the character and the viewer. As the show built to its climax, the inexplicable events grew more frightening and threatening. Then, at the end, came the denouement, the "unraveling," and both the character and the viewer understood what had happened—the ending might be redemptive, it might be horrific, but you only found out at the end; or if you didn't, you got a vague idea of what had happened.

A Twilight Zone Episode titled "The Hitchhiker" 

exemplifies this strategy of story-telling. A woman

driving cross-country begins seeing a hitchhiker. He asks for a ride, and is obnoxious, all but insisting she let him in the car. She refuses and drives off, but he begins to show up in different places. Once her car will not start and he begins slowly walking toward her. The car finally starts and she pulls off. Another time, she is stopped by a train, sees him standing there, looks around for a way to escape his presence, but finds he has disappeared. Another time, she asks a filling station attendant to tell him to leave her alone. Again, he has disappeared. Distraught, the woman calls her mother. She is informed that her mother is sedated after breaking down when she found out her daughter had been killed in an automobile accident three days ago. The woman goes back to her car. She turns the mirror down to see the Hitchhiker sitting in the back seat. "You are going my way," he says. He is Death 

and has come for her.

Lots of Twilight Zone episodes followed this pattern. I decided I would write one as well. The story was called "You Are Here."

In that story, a woman (named Felicity) goes into a highway rest stop. After using the bathroom, she notices the familiar push-pin on the map with the caption YOU ARE HERE has fallen down. She tells the janitor, who says he will fix it. She sees he has put it in the wrong place, goes to tell him, but sees he is not the same janitor as was working before. Soon she encounters people:  four young women dressed in sixties style. One of them has a turquoise transistor radio and listening to "Look Through Any Window" by the Hollies. Felicity goes outside and finds the parking lot empty

Back inside, she sees a new janitor, a woman this

time, who tells her that once again the YOU ARE HERE

pin has fallen down. Spooked, Feicity runs outside. She is relieved to see cars on the parking lot again, though they look old—she sees Studebakers, Desotos, and classic Corvettes but then is horrified to find them inhabited by decaying corpses of drivers and families. She runs back to the rest stop. Inside, a woman with an Obama for President button approaches her. Felicity is relieved that someone from her own era is there. But in the last sentence of the story, the woman addresses Felicity: “Could you tell me exactly where we are?” she asked. “I think the marker on the map must have fallen off.”

What will happen to the Felicity? You're not sure. But she is somehow trapped in a non-reality—or a different reality. You sense she will never escape. Is she like the retro girls, the janitor, the woman with the Obama button, trapped? Is she dead? The corpses in the parked cars suggest as much. The reader (and the author) are not sure. But something strange and frightening has occurred.

The Twilight Zone began with a monologue spoken by the show's creator, the late Rod Serling. The opening varied from season to season. Here's the one I remember most:  You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the signpost up ahead - your next stop, the Twilight Zone. In a different dimension, strange things can happen.

Uncertainty, the disruption of normalcy, and the fear this brings were key elements in this show that sometimes frightened me as a child so much I would hide in my bedroom and put a pillow over my head so I couldn't hear the sound from the TV in the living room.

This is the stuff of good horror.

The story appeared in Monster's Travel Anthology--no longer in print or available.

Read ShadowCity, paranormal fiction about love, darkness, and the light within you.  

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The Old Man in the Cave

When I was a kid I saw an episode of The Twilight Zone titled “The Old Man in the Cave.” The story took viewers to post-apocalyptic America. A nuclear war has devastated society. Cars are pulled by horses. There is little food. People live at the subsistence level. The citizens of a small town find a cache of food and wonder if they can eat it or if it is contaminated by radiation. The Mayor of the town, named Goldsmith, goes to a mysterious figure called The Old Man in the Cave, who examines the food and finds it is contaminated. The people of the town have apparently depended on the Old Man in the Cave for many years. Viewers get the idea that this figure possesses insight no one else has and is always right.

A group of soldiers, led by Major French (played by a young James Coburn) enters the town and tries to take it over. They immediately come into conflict with Goldsmith and scoff at the idea that there is an Old Man in the Cave. Eventually, the soldiers and townspeople find out that the Old Man in the Cave is a computer, which the people destroy. They eat the food (except for Goldsmith) and all die.

Reviews said the episode was a warning against greed and lack of discipline and in the dangers of questioning one’s faith in “forces greater than oneself.” But the faith in this tale is not in God or Truth. The higher power one is to have faith in is what we often call Science, incarnated by the computer.

The plot has a few flaws. Why didn’t Goldsmith simply tell the people he owns a computer than can do analysis on things and help them survive? Why does he create a myth? If there is no electric power in the town (there does not seem to be), how does the computer operate? Further, why do the people destroy it? They might be angry with Goldsmith for deceiving them, but one would think they would have the common sense to say, “A computer! Why didn’t you tell us in the first place? Great! This will enhance our chances of survival.”

The Old Man in the Cave--idea of a computer in 1963,

I think the answer lies in the theme of the episode, which is, You have to worship Science.

An old man in a cave is a trope from religion:  the prophet, the guru, the hermit-saint, the oracle, the Sybil (female in this case) who can foresee the future all live in caves. They possess special divine power. Their word is not to be questioned or challenged.

The computer has “saved” the people of the town. Religions, especially Christianity, use the term for being rescued from sin and from God’s wrath. In this case, it is salvation from death. A higher power is delivering the people in in the town from destruction, and they should be thankful (worshipful?) for this.

But the people are gullible, stupid, impetuous, and greedy. They are “sinners.” They destroy the computer and devour the food. In contrast to them, Goldsmith is quiet and saintly. He is like the faithful priest, displaying circumspection, self-control, and knowledge, in contrast to unenlightened mob of shallow-minded folk who destroy the computer.

When they disobey the Old Man in the Cave, they all die. 

Major French dead after eating contaminated food.

Many such stories like this one could be seen in the 1950s and 1960s. The idea such stories advanced suggested that science could save the world. Technology was salvation. The future and the survival of the human race depended on allegiance to (worship of?) Science.

Of course, the irony is that Science created the very things—atomic weapons—that would have caused the scenario depicted in “The Old Man in the Cave.” Such wonders as biological warfare, weapons of mass destruction, and drones are the product of scientifically advanced technology. The Old Man in the Cave—Science—can and has caused as much trouble, or more, than any deity on a throne in the sky, be it Zeus, Odin, the Lord, or Ravana. 

In writing, one must be careful to recognize the destructive potential of technology and not to worship it in the way this episode of The Twilight Zone suggested a society should. Like religion, Science has done a great deal of good but also has perpetuated innumerable evils.

This is especially true for those who write science fiction. The same technologies that make space travel possible can also create weapons. Science is a neutral force that can be used for good or evil depending on the morality of those who use it.

It is fascinating that much of fantasy takes place in pre-technological societies where there were no weapons of mass destruction. Much paranormal literature is staged in modern times, but the technological features of today are merely the backdrop for conflict of a more primal nature. Vampires and werewolves may own computers, but it all still comes down to fangs and claws when the final conflict arrives.

Even sci-fi writers should avoid the trope of worshipping Science. The wonders of technology can easily be contrasted with the horrors of technology.

More on this in my next blog.