Dave’s Anatomy: My History As a Writer #99: Horror, “The Gremlin.”

I don’t write a lot of horror—some, but not much, since I prefer paranormal and fantasy writing with a little literary fiction mixed in. But I do indulge occasionally. I have written several stories for The Horror Zine, one of the best e-zines of that genre on the web. One of them was “The Gremlin.”

Most people know that Gremlins are creatures who tear up airplanes. RAF pilots in World War II reported seeing them—probably a result of fatigue and stress from flying too many missions. They began to appear in novels and stories and became famous with the publication of a book by Roald Dahl, better known for later stories like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and Giant Peach. They took their place in mythology, a specialized sort of elf or imp. But they weren’t always cute little creatures. Many people remember the episode, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” from The Twilight Zone where William Shatner sees a Gremlin on the wing of passenger plane. Everyone remembers the scene where he pulls the curtain back and the Gremlin is staring at him, its face pressed against the window.

I had been trying to write a story in response to a call for submissions of Indiana stories. After repeated attempts to write a tale about my hometown of Kokomo, Indiana (yes, there is such a place; no, it is not the place the Beach Boys mention in their song), I gave up on my original story and decided to switch it to a horror tale. For some reason, I chose a Gremlin.

Elwood Haynes and early automobile

One of Kokomo’s claims to fame is that one of the first automobiles was invented there. It was built and driven in 1906 by a man named Elwood Haynes (who also invented the process for making stainless steel). I had originally meant to write a story of his first drive down a road called Punkinvine Pike, but the story just would not set up. So I switched it to a story about a young man and young woman driving down the pike who are attached by a Gremlin.

Why would a Gremlin attack them? I’m not sure. But those creatures seem to have an aversion to mechanical things. I got the idea that Haynes’ development of automobiles ruined their peaceful environment and they still harbor a lot of chagrin toward mechanical things. They hit the gremlin, call the police, but the creature manages to get away before they police arrive. They ask Alex (the main character, Alex Haynes, is related to Elwood) what happened. He tells them they hit something, some kind of animal that looked like an orangutan but had green fur. The police ask if he has been drinking. His girlfriend’s parents take her home. Alex then is taken to the police station. He asks why. They only say they want to question him further out of “concern for public safety”—the creature he has described, they say, might be dangerous, might have escaped from a zoo.

Gremlin from Twilight Zone

At the police station he is questioned by federal agents. They tell him the blood and fur samples on his car are not related to any species except some they found on British aircraft during World War II. Then they ask him if he knows anything about Gremlins. Alex answers:  “Gremlins? Well, it was a car produced by American Motors in the 1960s. Or a monster—one of them scared the hell out of William Shatner on an old Twilight Zone episode. Other than that, I’m not real up on them.”

They reply that they are concerned because Gremlins really do seem to exist, evidence of them has been found in the Middle East, and they are concerned this may be a threat to national security. “So he might be working for Al Qaeda?” Alex asks. After more questioning, they let him go. He returns home. The Gremlin comes after him.

It breaks into his house. He has a .22 hunting rifle—not a lot of velocity—but puts enough bullets in it that the creature flees. When he jumps out the window he broke in through there is the sound of machine gun and heavy weapons fire. The local SWAT team and the federal agents are there. He knows a SWAT team member from school. She tells them they have to take him in:  standard policy for anyone they find with a weapon, and he still had the .22. There, the Federal Agents tell him they thought the creature might come back and so they and the local police staked the place out. “If this was a gremlin, we need to study it. Unleashing such creatures on our military installations, especially in the Middle East, is something we must be concerned about—at least about the possibility. We want learn as much about the creature as we can. And we don’t want the existence of the creature to leak out so that we have an uncontrollable media event on our hands. We’ll have to ask you to keep quiet about this—in fact, we’ll have to insist on it.”

Alex understands. The Federal Agents say they will pay him “compensation” for all that has happened. If the government can’t throw you in jail, he muses, they can always pay you off. He feels some sympathy for the Gremlin, who takes on the stock role of the pitiable monster—like Frankenstein or the American Werewolf in London. He wonders if Elwood Haynes perhaps first woke the creature when he drove his early automobile; if the creature perhaps hibernated but was awakened by the scent of a relative’s blood. He wonders where it all will end. He also wonders how many more gremlins will begin to awaken now.

The story appeared in Shadow Masters, a publication put out by the very fine publication, The Horror Zine. It is available through Amazon. 

For more good horror, get a copy of my vampire saga, Sinfonia.

For additional titles check out my Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your comments.

Happy horror readings. Be afraid; be very afraid.

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer #43: "The Room of Mirrors," Horror and the "Other"

The idea for the story "The Room of Mirrors" came from a novel by Pearl Buck I taught one semester at Grand Valley State University. A class titled Literatures in English emphasizes works written in English but suggests instructors focus on books from outside America and the United Kingdom. I taught books written in English from Nigeria, India, Nepal, Australia, South Africa, and other cultures. I did teach one that semester by an American writer, Pearl Buck.

Pearl Buck is most famous for her novel The Good Earth, about China. She grew up as a missionary kid in China and often wrote about that culture and other Asian cultures. I didn't want to teach The Good Earth because instructors teach it frequently, so, as I often do, I picked one of her more obscure books. Mandala is a novel she wrote about India. I would call it good but not great; still, it gave me some ideas and focused my imagination on Indian culture. This led me to write a story about an Indian man's involvement with an American woman—a feature taken from Buck's novel.

But this was a horror story. A young woman who in college became a call girl now pursues that as a vocation. She ends up as mistress to an Maharini, the ruler of a province in India. He keeps her in a place called The Room of Mirrors, which is, as the name implies, completely covered in mirrors. The place creeps Phoebe out, but she likes the isolation of the estate the Maharini, Shashindra, maintains. She likes the quiet and the beautiful view of the Himalayas because she is contemplating an important choice. Her old boyfriend, Calvin, who knows about her choice of vocation, has offered to marry her. She wonders if she can leave her vocation and be faithful to him—and if he will continue to love her, given the trade she has plied the last few years. He says it doesn't matter to him. Phoebe is not so sure.

 She has a nightmare in which she sees every panel of mirror in her bedroom showing the face of a woman. Most are Indian, a few are African or European. And at last she sees a blonde woman covered with blood, standing next to her, outside of the mirrors. She cries out. One of the Indian servants comes to her, asks her what the dream was so he can interpret it, but when she describes it, he obfuscates. She dismisses the dream and tries to sort through the issues involved with her choice to go with Calvin or continue working as a high-class prostitute.

Calvin has met a girl named Charissa, who is Greek and an actress. He has told her about Phoebe (the story has two narrative streams). The same woman shows up at the Room of Mirrors and, tells Phoebe something she is not supposed to know that enables her to escape the room of mirrors.

First, she tells her about the room and explains the faces Phoebe saw in the mirror. They are the imprisoned souls of women who have served as mistresses to various rulers of the province. After they die, their souls are imprisoned. The sorcerer who arranged the spell so the Maharini's wives would not perceive their husbands' infidelity lives eternally from the energy of their spirits and from their anguish. Charissa had become one of the current Maharini's women in order to get acting roles. In her depression, she killed herself, but because she died in the Room of Mirrors by suicide, is able to get out. She is the key to freeing the women. Phoebe only has to lure the Maharini into the room for the women to exact their revenge.

Phoebe uses her charms to lure him up that very night. The women's arms and then bodies emerge from the room in a current of snaky distortion and engulf him. Charissa protects Phoebe. The women, however, do not kill the Maharini. He is unconscious but not dead at the end of his ordeal. A doctor proclaims a heart attack. Charissa can now resume her life and she and Phoebe see the women of the Room of Mirrors freed from the imprisoning spell and the spirit of the sorcerer who imprisoned them dissolve in anguish. Charissa resumes her career (she has an plausible explanation for where she has been for the last two years). Phoebe leaves with Calvin for a new life together with him.

Writing about foreign cultures is tricky. Edward Said's book, Orientalism, notes how Westerners often stereotype and exoticize third world peoples. I was aware of this danger as I wrote, though I might have fallen into the habit a little. Still, the story was written to give a moral lesson, and people of all races and creeds can exploit others. And I like to think justice was done in the story, though, I admit, the Westerner comes to "save" the people from the "other" culture, and so it does fall into the habits Said's book warned us against.

But the story stands and I think, even if it does have flaws, it is a good story. Can a Westerner represent other cultures equitably? Well, I'm trying and learning. "The Room of Mirrors" is possibly a first step and an experience that will teach me. Writers evolve.

"The Room of Mirrors appeared in a journal that is no longer published. Another story to re-submit!

And I have a new book out--ironically, about a non-Western character. The Sorceress of Time is about Asian culture and wuxia warriors (more cultural exchange here). Read for a story of choices, time travel, and the pursuit of justice and right. If you've seen Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, you will know a little about wuxia. Only this story has a happier ending!

For more book titles, see my Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your comments.

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #41: The Welcome Song of Morrigan

The Celtic Goddess Morrigan is one of my favorite deities to vilify. Maybe I need to be careful, because if she exists she probably doesn't have a very good opinion of me—and she's not a supernatural being you want to be on the bad side of. She was the Celtic goddess of war and of discord. Like many deities, she is an ambiguous figure. In the ancient Irish languages, if you accented her name as Mórrígan it meant "great queen; if you did not accent it and called her Morrigan, it meant "phantom queen." Her totem animal was the crow and she was sometimes said to feast on the bodies of slain warriors through the form of the carrion crows who always hung around battlefields to eat the corpses when the fighting was done. All in all, she was a troublemaker and a goddess to be afraid of. She appears as a malevolent force in my book The Last Minstrel and my long story, "The Raven and the Forest Girl." In the story "The Welcome Song of Morrigan," you do not see her but she is an evil presence throughout the story.

I was still shooting for dark horror at this time. As the title to my story implies, it is about a song, and about a musician, Shane Evans. He plays and researches Celtic music and is following up some leads on an Irish harper who collected old tunes. After the man's death, his son moved to northern Michigan but one day the son's new bride killed him and two of the servants who worked for the family. Sentenced to life in prison, she killed two inmates, was put in solitary confinement, and eventually hanged herself. The house, controlled by a trust, has given Shane permission to go through the musical archives there. He is let into the house by a teenage girl named Tina who says she plays guitar and likes Celtic music. Her boyfriend, she says, plays in a rock band.

Shane is lucky that day—or so he thinks. He finds three pieces of music he does not recognize. One is written on velum, not paper, sealed, and titled "The Welcome Song of Morrigan." Shane is elated. Tina looks at the music and asks if she could perhaps have a transcription of it. Shane makes copies for her and drives back to his home in Grand Rapids, quite a ways away, leaving his discovery in his music studio. Wanting to celebrate, he goes to a coffee bar where he knows friends will be, finds them, and shares his good news. At the table is a young woman named Devona, quite beautiful, and interested in Shane's discovery. As they are talking, police appear and want to question Shane. He finds out Tina has killed her boyfriend, hacking him to death with an ax. When he goes back in, Devona identifies herself as one of the elven people and tells him what he has recovered is the Welcome Song of Morrigan—a song with a curse on it that welcomes people to madness, violence, and death.

After hearing about Tina and now meeting up with Devona, Shane wonders if all the psychotic women in the world have come to Michigan. He goes outside, a car screeches to halt, and Tina, looking demonic, attacks him. Devona validates her claim of being a supernatural creature by magically deflecting the ax. The police, who have remained (correctly thinking the girl might come there to kill Shane) confront her. She attacks one of them, wounding him with the ax. They shoot and kill her. Shane goes to the police station. When he sees Devona again, she asks where the music is. She plans to recover it and guard it, which is her task as a supernatural creature. They drive to his home. When they arrive, Shane is horrified to see Leah Roush's car in the driveway.

Leah is a friend who plays in a local rock band. Shane has given her a key to his studio so she can use his equipment. He and Devona rush inside to find Leah's severed head on a table. Shane thinks she found the music, played it, and someone, probably her boyfriend, heard it and killed her.

The police eventually find Leah's boyfriend's body (he has killed himself) and a note that says, "She killed her." They think he means Tina but Shane knows he meant Morrigan. The music is there. Devona seals it and says she will take it to the Temple in the lost land of the faerie folk where she is the guardian of the document. The Queen of Faeries, she says, has granted her a boon—anything she desires—as a reward if she finds the song and brings it back. She and Shane make love. She confides that the Faerie Queen made her leave her husband and children and become a guardian thousands of years ago (which is why she is so eager to make it with Shane). He suggests she use her boon to ask that she be freed from her task. She agrees and goes to present her petition to the Queen. She will become mortal when her request is granted but is willing to pay that price for freedom and for love.

Shane goes to the police station. The police conclude that Tina killed Leah and her boyfriend killed himself out of grief. Shane is exonerated and the Welcome Song of Morrigan is safely sealed away in the Temple of the Fairy Queen. When Shane returns to the 24/7 coffee house, he finds Devona waiting for him.

 The story appeared in Ladies and Gentlemen of Horror, 2011, which appears to be out of print now. Some of my Morrigan stories are accessible, though. You can read a lot about her in The Last Minstrel where she appears frequently and in all her nasty, malicious glory. The same is true in a my novella,  "The Raven and the Forest Girl,"which appeared recently in Silver Blade. In this particular story, Morrigan does her evil but finds out there are deities floating around who are much more powerful than she.  As I'm doing with many of my stories that have appeared in magazines no longer in publication, I'm going to find out about copyright issues and, if they are not an obstacle, resubmit and, hopefully, republish "The Welcome Song of Morrigan" to make it once more accessible to the reading public.

For more titles, look at my Writer's Page. 

I would love to hear your comments!

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer #34: Werewolves Again: "The Girlfriend"

 

Lon Chaney, Jr., as the Wolfman

Writers are like anyone else. They can get on a "kick" and they can get stuck on a theme. I had written the story "Wolf Moon," a science fiction story about werewolves marooned on a planet who manage to get free (see Dave's Anatomy #32). And werewolves were on my mind. I would not say I got obsessed or was on a kick. But the theme of werewolves is fascinating. Once, while watching an old movie on TV where Lon Chaney, Jr., is undergoing the transformation to his wolf-self, an aunt of mine, who, as far as I knew, was no great fan of horror, and happened to walk in and see that little segment of the movie. She told me, "I always feel sorry for the Wolfman. He doesn’t want it [the transformation] to happen, but then it does and he can't stop it." Maybe that's the essence of why we find werewolves fascinating (I would say this applies to vampires too). Something happens you did not ask for and cannot control. You fight against it, you take precautions against it, but eventually it gets the better of you. Kind of like life, right? But werewolves bring in the horror element.

In the story, "The Girlfriend," boy meets girl. So far so good. Sabrina plays violin for the city symphonic orchestra. She meets Wayne and likes him, they begin to date and develop an intimate relationship. Everything about him checks out—except for a few anomalous matters. Once a month, usually around the time of the full moon, he is unavailable. Wayne works for a prosperous firm that designs and builds various kinds of structures. Sabrina can see how he might travel a lot, though sometimes his absences are disappointing.

Sabrina is chosen to play the solo parts in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D, a difficult piece that, if she executes it well, will advance her career. She practices diligently but Wayne says he has to go to Europe when the concert is scheduled. She asks if he can negotiate the trip because she wants him to be there to see her perform. He insists he has to go and apologizes. Sabrina performs a flawless and powerful concert. Her friends throw a party for her, but her happiness is dampened by the fact that Wayne could not be there. She reconciles her feelings. After all, he has a good job and it makes demands on him. But when he meets one of Wayne's friends from work, she finds out he was lying. The friend tells her he was at work all week long. He did not go to Zurich.

Sabrina is angry, to say the least. The following exchange takes place:

“Why did you lie to me, goddamn it?” I hissed at him, my face red. “Tell me the truth.”

When he did not reply I added, “Are you seeing someone else?”

            “If you’ll come over tonight I’ll try to explain.”

“Explain? Explain what? Maybe you can call up your other girlfriend. Hell, we’ll have a ménage a trios.”

            He put up his hands, looked side to side, and spoke.

            “There was a reason I lied to you.”

            “It had better be a damned good one.”

            “It is. Come over tonight and you’ll find out all about it.”

            “I don’t know, Wayne. I’m not sure I want to hear your fucking explanation.”

            “If you don’t, don’t come. But I want to explain it to you, Sabrina.”

Sabrina struggles with it and then decides to go. When she get to his house, his sister, Constance, meets her. Wayne is nowhere to be seen. Constance takes Sabrina downstairs. She suddenly finds herself enclosed in a small glass booth. A glass wall separates it from an old basement that has been redone, the windows sealed, all the furniture removed. Sabrina is suddenly seized with terror, thinking the two of them are psychopaths who lure women into a soundproof area and then . . . well, who knows what? Constance assures her this is not the case.

Sabrina sees Wayne. He stands on the other side of the glass, turns and opens the window shade to the full moon, and begins the painful transformation to a werewolf. She does not believe in werewolf legends and thinks they them "ignorant, superstitious myth from barbaric eras in human history." Experience teaches her how wrong she has been.

A technique in writing effective horror is to make the supernatural real. In the old movies, Lawrence Talbot (the old werewolf) and Tony Rivers (the teenage werewolf) always manage to keep some clothes on for the sake of modesty. But this is unrealistic, and the transformed Wayne rips his garments to shreds. Sabrina is terrified but tells Constance she wants to watch. She does not want to leave him. She manages to endure seeing him in his animal form.

Afterwards, Constance tells how her brother became a werewolf. Constance falls asleep as Sabrina contemplates where their relationship will go. Would she be willing to help Wayne through a dysfunctionality she had not imagined really existed? She thinks she will. The story ends with her contemplating the difficulties she will face.

This story was published in Lightning Flash--now defunct, no archive. 

For information on the books I've written, check out my Writer's Page. 

For a great Christmas stocking stuffer (for adult stockings), get a copy of ShadowCity. In a dark world, the light within you is all you have. 

I would love to see your comments.