What's in a Genre: Evil, the Loss of Good

C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis once remarked (in his “Preface” to the 1961 edition of The Screwtape Letters) that there is no such thing as absolute evil. The Devil, he suggests, is not the evil opposite of God; he is the evil opposite of a fallen angel, Michael. Lewis goes on to note that if you took everything good away from the Devil—mind, will, and existence itself—there would be nothing left. Evil is derivative. It is not a thing that has an existence in and of itself. It is only the perverting and twisting of something good.

I liked this idea and incorporated it into a story called The Loss of Good. A woman is trying to rescue a friend who thinks because he once “sold his sold to the Devil” he has to commit suicide in obedience to his vow. The woman calls up a friend who is an Anglican nun and who has counseled those involved in the occult. The following exchange takes place. The nun, Heather, explains to her:

  

“Whatever power evil may have, it is shabby and feeble. In the end it has no real power because it derives from good.”

“It derives from good? How?”

“Evil is only the twisting of good. Like C. S. Lewis once wrote:  if you took everything away from the Devil that is good, there would be nothing left of him.”

“What’s good about the Devil?”

“He exists. He has a will, a mind; obviously he has emotions. He wants things. He has perverted all of this and turned against God, but the things in themselves are good things. If there was nothing good about him he would not exist.”

So when I look at some horror literature that suggests there is an absolute, unstoppable, complete and total evil lurking on earth, it gives me pause. How could there be absolute evil, since existence is good? If something was completely evil, it could not exist. Existence itself is good. Evil does dwell on earth. All we have to do is turn on the news reports to know that—or, often, look into our pasts. But it is not a thing in and of itself. It needs the raw material of good. Otherwise, it would fade out in a puff of smoke.

 

Faust and Mephistophiles

Paranormal literature recognizes as much. In paranormal, as I understand it, evil does reign or rule. It is not magnificent. It is not all-powerful. In a sense, it is jerry-rigged. It is shabby and tacky. The political thinker Hannah Arendt gave the phrase, “the banality of evil.” Visions of evil as magnificent and sophisticated are not accurate.

Robert Herrick, a poet from the 1600s famous for his line, “gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” wrote a little poem (where I got the title for my story) that rehearses the same idea Lewis set out:

Evil no nature hath; the loss of good

Is that which gives to sin its livelihood.

Lewis and Herrick are both echoing the ideas of the early Christian writer Augustine. But whether one is religious or not, the idea that evil has a “nature” and exists in and of itself, or is stronger than good, depends on  a certain idea of the nature of things. It is only by taking the good out of something good that evil can form. As such, evil is not more powerful than good. Evil is vulnerable. It is always fighting a defensive war. Paranormal literature tends to reflect this.This marks it out as a distinct genre.

Still more to come on this subject.

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What’s in a Genre: Speculative Fiction

Robert Heinlein

Robert Heinlein is generally credited with inventing the term “speculative fiction.” He did this because some of his fiction did not fit neatly into existing categories. The term is used today in varying ways. David Bowlin, editor of Shadowkeep Magazine, penned this definition: “Speculative fiction is a world that writers create, where anything can happen. It is a place beyond reality, a place that could have been, or might have been, if only the rules of the universe were altered just a bit. Speculative fiction goes beyond the horror of everyday life and takes the reader (and writer) into a world of magic, fantasy, and science. It is a world where you leave part of yourself behind when you return to the universe as we know it, the so-called real world. Speculative fiction defines the best in humanity: imagination, and the sharing of it with others.” 

That’s as good a definition as I’ve ever read, but it leaves out a differentiation I think is vital. In speculative fiction, at least as I understand the term, evil does not rule. In my last blog, I talked about horror and how that genre, in its purest form, presents evil as being stronger than good.  Speculative fiction allows for the predominance of good.  In speculative fiction (as distinguished from horror) there will be an ending in which the good will come out on top. It may emerge bruised and bleeding. Its victory may be purchased with blood and pain, but good will prevail. The monsters are subdued. Order is restored. At the end of the story there is reconciliation.

Let me give you an example. In 2010 I published a story called “Polarity” in an anthology, Dark Things II, by the now-defunct Pill Hill Press.  A prostitute, Millie, gets paid for standing naked during a ceremony. She isn’t sure what is going on, but is happy to make money without having to give out sex. The only thing that disturbs her is the girl the man calls “Carrie,” who looks to be sixteen or so and who stands opposite her, also naked. She could be underage.

Millie, who is unhappy about how her life has turned out, runs into Carrie, who is the man’s daughter and a virgin who can fulfill a ceremonial role in her father’s satanic rituals where he calls demonic curses on people. For protection, he uses a spell that requires two women to flank him, one a virgin, and one a whore.

Carrie serves her father only through fear. He has threatened to kill her mother and brothers (who have deserted him and live elsewhere) if she doesn’t cooperate. During the course of the conversation, Millie confides that she wants out of the life she lives but doesn’t know if she’s smart enough to do anything else. Carrie assured her she can. She also says she can overcome her father if she and Millie reverse the “polarity” of the spell that protects him from the demons. Carrie must lose her virginity; Millie must repudiate being a prostitute.

Easy for Carrie, more difficult for Millie—but Millie tells her sister, who runs the small brothel where she plies her trade, that she is quitting. Her sister is scornful but has no choice if Millie wants to leave. She also talks to a clergyman and makes a vow she will abandon her life of prostitution. At the next ceremony, the father realizes, too late, that the spell he has relied on will not work and is destroyed by the demons.

In the follow-up to the story, Carrie is reunited with her family. Millie gets a regular job and begins taking classes to become a nurse. She also is romanced by a man she serviced once a week who hints he might want to marry her. In other words, a happy ending.

Oscar Wilde has a character in one of his plays quip, “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.” To me, at least, that is what speculative fiction means. Endings are happy or are somewhat happy. They are at least hopeful. The demons will not return and “get” Carrie and Millie. The Father will not come back to life and wreak vengeance on them. In horror this would happen. Not in speculative fiction as I understand it.

So speculative fiction involves a view of the world where good prevails and is stronger than evil. This is not a Pollyanna world. It is not a world of easy answers. Yet it is a world where one might hope that the right can prevail and, as Wilde said, the good end happily, the bad unhappily.

This involves a certain concept of the universe and the nature of good and evil. More on this in my next blog.

What’s in a Genre; or, I Found Out I’m Not a Horror Writer (Part I)

When I say I’m not a horror writer, I’m not saying I haven’t written it. I have published quite a few stories in that genre. In fact, I’m featured in Ladies and Gentlemen of Horror, 2011, and have published in The Horror Zine, Indiana Horror, Horror Through the Ages, and other journals and anthologies that support that genre. The first story I ever published in a print journal, in fact, was a horror tale, “The Snow Demon,” in an anthology called Dark Distortions.

But with a difference.

My stories usually had a happy ending.

Most often in what I wrote, the monsters, killers, zombies, or vampires are defeated and the good people survive. The ghouls might take out a few of the bad people, but they are not the victors.. And I did do dark horror now and then. In a story called “The Woman Who Loved Books,” the protagonist is enslaved by a supernatural being who thrives off books and requires people to read to her; another tale called “Prima Noctis” has vampires destroying an entire medieval household. But most of my stories, I noticed through the years, do not end this way. Most of my stuff ends with good overcoming evil. This is why I say I’m not a horror writer. In true horror, at least as I understand the term, evil mostly overcomes and wins.

Horror is, admittedly, a hard genre to pin down. And it contains sub-genres, such as dark horror and soft horror. To me, at least, true horror has evil prevailing.

 

A true horror novel by Steven King is Pet Sematary. Nothing good happens. In fact, the worst possible series of events unfolds. A family is destroyed, along with many other people, by evil. The same is true with his memorable short story, “Children of the Corn.” The demonic children of Gatlin kill Burt and Vicky. They have killed all the adults in town and then sacrifice themselves to the evil that dwells in the corn. One girl hates the corn and wants to set it on fire, but she is too afraid because the corn can see into the human heart.  Evil wins because it is unstoppable.

This is what I read in horror. Evil is stronger than good. If you happen to encounter a manifestation of evil, you’re done for. There is no fighting it. And it will always return. In one of my stories called “City Limits,” the characters suffer horrific things at the hands of zombies who “drink” their souls to survive. They escape in the end. The editor who accepted it for publication told me, though, that I needed to add something unsettling to the ending:  the zombies find the escapees; or at least the hint they may show up again sometime. I did the latter. That made the story more horrific. Good had prevailed—well, maybe it had. This is a requirement of horror.

And so you have it. The simplest sort of horror is where person A is going somewhere.

Along comes an evil entity B, a monster of some sort, and kills them. I’ve never thought stories like this had much depth, but they are usually violent and gory, and the bad things win. Another is like Ring, the Japanese horror film where a murdering ghost cannot be destroyed but must be appeased by an endless line of victims. Unstoppable evil is required in stories such as this. There are lots of variations on the themes, but in the end, evil wins.

I don’t want anyone to get the idea that I am vilifying or demeaning horror. It is a genre loved by many. I've written it myself. Increasingly, though, I see that it doesn’t coincide with my vision of the universe.

So if I don’t write horror but still write about monsters, ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and supernatural creatures, what should my writing be called? What genre is it?

I will explain this in my next blog.

Fossils of the Mind--Recovering the Ferly

“The mind has her fossils too,” a poem by C. S. Lewis begins, and his verse describes the time when “the pen, fast, fast / Ate up the sheets,” but then the project lost its spark, died out, and ended up in a drawer somewhere because “the ferly would not last.” “Ferly” means wonder, magic, astonishment. Sometimes, he recognized, writing seems magically inspired, but somehow the magic slips away, the story or poem loses its enchantment, and we abandon it.

Maenads and Silenus in Prince Caspian

Do lost stories ever come back? I’d like to suggest they can. In fact, the old fossils of the mind can be brought back to life like Elijah’s dry bones. I’ve experienced this with my own writing. 

Early in my writing days, I worked on science fiction. Like many science fiction writers, I did 

considerable world-building. I created planets, civilizations, and races of beings, intergalactic empires, good aliens and bad ones, and characters who arose out of these different places. The trouble was, my ability to create them did not equal my ability to express what I had created. My writing ability, still in its infancy, failed to adequately express the cosmos I had created. So I abandoned them. But they did not go away entirely. Like Lewis says in his poem, I occasionally encounter them: "Old papers, as we rummage through / Neglected drawers.” I would see old drafts, re-read them, smile at the clumsy writing, and feel nostalgia for those old stories and worlds.

As my technique developed, as I had some success as a writer, I began to think of them again. They were good ideas. I had created an attractive cosmos. The old characters were interesting. I simply had not possessed the technique to present them well enough.

My first attempt at getting the ferly back resulted in a story called Antigone. It did not use old characters but did use the old sci-fi universe I had created.  Not long after that I published two more stories using the universe. And of late, I pulled one of my old characters out of the drawer and wrote a story about her—slated for publication as well. 

I saw the ferly return.

Lewis attributes the failure of some imaginative projects to the chasm between what the imagination can come up with and the demands of life, time, and energy. Very true, but I like to think that sometimes it is mere lack of technique. We improve as writers, and some of the projects we had to abandon in our earlier careers (Shakespeare had one character call it “my salad days, when I was young and green”) might be resurrected. I’ve begun doing this with my own early writing:  rewriting it, using old characters and old tropes. So far, it is bearing some good fruit.

I think we all have our creative fossils. Sometimes the ferly ran out—but did it run out merely because our reach exceeded our grasp? Because we simply did not have the ability to set down what our imaginations presented to us? I like to think this was the case with me. Now I’m going back to the old quarries and seeing what I can dig up, reshape, and start to shape into new forms. When I do this, the ferly animates and the pen begins to eat  up the sheets of paper once more.

The freshness of my early ideas delights me when I go back and look on them. It’s hard work to reshape literary creations, but it’s rewarding. If you have fossils of your own, dig them up and take a look at them. You might be surprised at the rough beauty of what got buried.