So here is my first introduction to something associated with the Cthulhu mythos. Granted, it’s a subtle reference, but it’s there. I think Lovecraft had a thing for marine organisms. Really big, ugly marine organisms.

Anyway, as I read Lovecraft, I’m enjoying subsequent stories better than previous ones. This is the first I’ve read where the narrator is a direct participant in the horrific events that happen. This really makes a difference. I still think there’s entirely too much telling and not enough showing, but it would be a novel if it went by modern strictures, rather than a short story.

Setting is still a character in this story. Indeed, Lovecraft seems on top of his game in bringing out the complete creepiness of the town of Innsmouth. The dilapidation of the town can be seen clearly in the descriptions. An interesting tactic that I think was a bit overdone was Lovecraft’s attribution of “fish” properties to things. A fishy odor is one thing, but he tended to drop fish or water references for lots of descriptions, regardless of whether it was an odor, something visual or even something aural. It was okay for awhile, but soon it became silly to attribute a fishy look to some inanimate object.

The ending I found interesting. Once it became clear that the narrator was one of the Innmouth people, I didn’t need Lovecraft to point out the things in the story that supported this conclusion (the Marsh woman who married the man by trickery, etc). I remembered those things. So having them told to me undermined the “ah ha!” moment I was having. I found this disappointing.

The ending also calls to mind the narrator’s flight from Innsmouth. He was never caught, so the reader is left to wonder: were the Innsmouth people chasing him to kill him, as he assumed, or were they chasing him because they recognized him as one of their own? That’s a question that won’t be answered, but I still find it intriguing. How would things have been different had be been captured before escaping? Would they have been able to convince him of his heritage? Would he have, instead, gone mad? Would they have kept him against his will? It leads to some interesting questions.

Overall, I like this story better than the others. The narrator is the protagonist, which I tend to prefer. Also, there’s more of a balance between setting and character in this story that is lacking in the previous stories. This really works, I think, because Lovecraft really was a setting mastermind, but when it’s all setting, I find the story itself to be lacking. Having a balance is ideal. Again, I would have liked a lot more action and dialogue rather than so much exposition (even the dialogue was exposition!), but on the whole, I didn’t hate it. :)

So this is the third Lovecraft story we’ve read for class and I will say it’s been my favorite so far. I suspect it has to do with the story being more about the characters than the setting.

We’ve ascertained that Lovecraft was a master of the “setting as character” skill. And while I have great respect for that, I find stories of that nature don’t hold my attention for very long. I have the same issue reading Tolkien, another master of this. When the story was about the characters (Fellowship of the Ring), I went along just fine. But in the later books, so much time was spent on the setting, I just put the books down. My own interest seems to always lie in the characters and their journey.

“The Thing on the Doorstep” is much more character-oriented than either “The Music of Erich Zann” or “Pickman’s Model.” Another story told in first person. Lovecraft seems fond of telling a story from a bystander’s point of view. Granted, in this case, the narrator has a direct hand in the end of the story, however, most of the frightening build-up of the story is left untold because we only get glimpses of it through a third person’s eyes.

This is an interesting way to build tension, I think. In life, it’s often what we don’t know which scares us the most. When we don’t know how badly we did on a test, we imagine failing the entire class. When we don’t know the details of an accident a loved one has been in, we think of the worst possible scenario. when we’re waiting for medical test results, we imagine the worst outcome. When we don’t know what to expect, we get anxious and freaked out.

Sometimes leaving the horrible thing to the imagination is the best way to completely squick the reader. The more I read of Lovecraft, the more I think that was his kink. Because he chooses not to write from the point of view of the character who is being haunted/hunted/corrupted, but rather a bystander, many details of the possibly horrific things done are lost, because this bystander isn’t on the inside. And so the reader begins imagining all these horrific things.

Our instructor recently engaged us in a discussion of our own fears and how we translate that into our stories in order to help engage our readers. I think this is what Lovecraft is doing. He is engaging the reader in the story – actually, he’s enlisting the reader to help tell the story. When the reader is left to imagine the horrors that Lovecraft leaves out, he’s going to imagine things that are much more personal to him than Lovecraft could ever have imagined. And using a bystander as the narrator is the perfect way to achieve it, I think. This is pretty brilliant.

As far as the story itself, I really enjoyed it so much more than the previous two. I did have an issue with all of the telling. I’d guess that 60% or more was simply told. I suspect that if the scenes were shown instead, we’d have a novella instead of a short story. But I still felt compelled to continue reading. I would have liked to have seen more detail at the end, though.

Overall, I did enjoy the story and I’m looking forward to reading more Lovecraft to see what other similarities and differences become apparent.

This is the first story we’ve had to read that was written during my lifetime. It was nice to be able to judge it by mostly modern standards.

I enjoyed this book very much. It was creepy and sometimes gross and that makes me happy! Creepy for the win! The use of atmosphere in this book was outstanding. Something that I think modern authors (particularly aspiring ones) don’t use enough are the senses besides hearing and sight. Hell House utilized smell often (the tarn jumps to mind) and tactile feeling (the ooze in the steam room) to great advantage. It really made the scenes exceptionally vivid.

The book is written in something of an omniscient point of view, which really lends itself to head-hopping. This is one of my pet peeves and often I’ll put a book down because of it because it’s too distracting. Hell House had a large amount of head-hopping, but I tried very hard to ignore it, in the same way I ignored structural issues I have with Phantom of the Opera and characterization issues I have with Lovecraft’s work. I really wanted to enjoy the story itself. I found the head-hopping bothersome, however.

I did find that the story, overall, had a somewhat misogynistic flavor. All of the women in the story – Edith, Florence, and the female doctor from the 1940 experiment – are all emotionally or mentally taken in by Belasco and ultimately cause the undoing of the teams. The men, even if they don’t survive or are otherwise attacked, are overpowered physically or psychologically (as in driven insane, not duped or being overtaken by Belasco’s will). Barrett believes throughout the entire book that he is correct, with the only moment of question being when he’s attacked in the steam room. Even when he’s killed, he never mentally acquiesces to the will of Belasco. That is reserved for the women. This implies that a woman is emotionally and/or mentally a more vulnerable person than a man. It’s the Eve Syndrome.

It’s especially surprising, I think, given the time frame of this book. It was written, most likely, in the late sixties, published in 1971. So this was at the height of the battle to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, the time where women really started taking charge of their lives, and when the abortion debate was getting into full swing (Roe v. Wade was decided by SCOTUS in 1973, but the case began in 1969/1970). Seeing the Eve Syndrome in Hell House was off-putting and somewhat disappointing.

Although I found both the head-hopping and the Eve Syndrome difficult to swallow, I still enjoyed Hell House. A few years ago I watched Rose Red (conceived by Stephen King) and I would say that he may have taken some inspiration for that mini series from Hell House, though I don’t know whether he actually did. There are a number of similarities between the two, particularly the “ghost hunter” aspect.

Overall, even with its drawbacks, I enjoyed reading Hell House and the writing was good enough to drag me through without too much problem. This one does not go on the Milk Crate of Sharing (where I put books for my friends to steal); instead, it will remain on my shelf.

“The Music of Erich Zann” is the second Lovecraft story I’ve read. It’s about a young man who discovers an old musician up in the uppermost floor of his rooming house. This musician plays darkly. The narrator is drawn to try to befriend him in order to hear more of the music. When in the uppermost room, the narrator is drawn to look out the window but does not until the end of the story, wherein he sees not rooftops, as he should, but nothing.

There are a number of similarities between “Zann” and the previous story I read. Both are centered around an artist who is, in some way, tortured. Pickman seems a willing victim, though still a victim, while Zann is most definitely unwilling. Zann is tormented by what’s out the window. He’s frightened, terrified. Demons or nothingness. These are what await humankind.

Like “Pickman’s Model,” the setting is a key character. It’s really this device which sets up the horror of the piece. I think it could be equated to the ominous music in a scary movie. The settings in Lovecraft’s stories set the tone and the ambiance; they lure the reader into a dark place where we’re drawn by the danger which lurks just past our field of vision. It’s really the anticipation which is most effective. I almost don’t want to know the ending, because that will mean that all the things my imagination is dredging up aren’t really what’s going on. I think, ultimately, this is the brilliance of Lovecraft’s writing. To a modern reader, the endings aren’t even remotely surprising… but what our imaginations can slip into the dark corners that Lovecraft paints – well, there’s the real horror, sport.

This brings us neatly to another similarity. In both “Pickman” and “Zann” the frightening thing is what’s not seen. In “Pickman,” the narrator doesn’t see the demon which is the painter’s model, but sees a photo and interprets its existence. In “Zann,” the narrator literally sees nothing and that is what is terrifying. The nothingness calls to him. It’s the dark corners, again, which are the frightening places. It’s what we don’t know – or what we didn’t know, but know now. It’s almost like a warning, that old proverb: Be careful what you wish for. Don’t look down the rabbit hole. You don’t want to know how deep it goes.

Both narrators escape the horror, but yet are still drawn to it in one way or another. For the “Pickman” narrator, he relives it in the retelling to Eliot and one suspects he relives it more often than that. In “Zann,” the narrator relives the terror by trying to find the original street where the rooming house was located. And he cannot find it. Yet he searches.

That’s what we humans do. We ride rollercoasters; we go to haunted houses; we skydive; we race cars; we rubberneck at accident sites; we watch scary movies. We search and we’re drawn to what ultimately terrifies us.

It took me quite awhile to get into this book. I was probably about one third of the way through before I really wanted to continue reading. There are a couple inherent drawbacks to reading Phantom. First, it’s from an entirely different time. When this was written, books had a different flavor, a different format. So many things that would be considered mistakes making a manuscript un-publishable (head hopping, lots and lots of exclamation points) were common. Also, this is a translation. The book was written in French, originally, and I’ve found that there are always a few issues when reading a translated work.

So when I read this book, I tried to take those two things into account. I have to admit, the head hopping got to me. From paragraph to paragraph sometimes we were in different people’s heads. As a reader of mostly modern books, this is something that isn’t common anymore. We tend to usually have a point of view character. I admit that this issue was something that really kept tripping me up.

As far as the story itself, this really didn’t strike me as horror. Perhaps I’m jaded, but I found myself more interested in it as a mystery than horrified at it as a monster tale. I’ve never seen the musical based on the book, so I really went into it with fresh eyes and no pre-conceptions. I only had the vaguest notion of the story itself. But I was an avid reader of Stephen King (of course), Clive Barker, Dean Koontz and various other prolific and scary dudes who wrote in the 80s and 90s. So I think my sense of what horror is is very much based on those books I read as a young adult. And Phantom just doesn’t make the cut for me as horror.

I did get drawn into the story because I wanted to know what the actual deal was. I wanted to know just how crazy Eric was. I was a little disappointed in his virtue at the end and how he released Christine, but it really just compounded my confusion about who and what he was. It seemed as though Leroux wanted him to be this horrible bad guy, but then didn’t want him to be this horrible bad guy. I didn’t know whether I was supposed to like him or hate him. Subsequently, I did neither.

I think Phantom would do well as a modern re-telling. I suppose there are a number of books which pay homage to this story, but I think a close re-telling with modern writing styles would make it a really interesting and attention-riveting book. So overall, I was a bit disappointed in the horror element of this one and once I suspended my issues with the writing style, I did like following the mystery of who the O.G. was and how it all got resolved. I probably wouldn’t read it again though.

Spoiler alert: The ending is revealed in this blog post.

I’m a horror reader. I spent my teens and twenties devouring horror books like a dragon devours little men with tiny swords. I couldn’t get enough of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Clive Barker, Brian Lumley, et al. But one glaring hole in my horror reading is the lack of Lovecraft on my shelf. I don’t know why, but I just never got around to reading the “classics” of horror. So when I found out we would be reading Lovecraft for my Horror Genre Reading class, I was excited.

Our first Lovecraft short story is “Pickman’s Model.” It’s a framed story in that the first person narrator is telling the story to the audience (really to a person named Eliot). He’s explaining why he stopped visiting with a particularly gifted artist prior to the artist’s disappearance. Though the artist was gifted, he had a habit of painting increasingly disturbing canvases featuring dark subjects such as demons and changelings.

In his last interaction with the artist, the narrator is led to a dark part of town and down into a basement which Pickman is using for his alternate studio. In this studio, he paints even more grotesque and frightening paintings. And eventually our narrator, after being scared out of his wits there, returns home to discover that Pickman’s most recent painting – of a huge, frightening demon gnawing on the head of a human – which he saw at the studio wasn’t developed from Pickman’s imagination, but was a real thing, a real model. This is the twist ending (obviously Lovecraft does it much better).

Modern audience are jaded. After all, we’re used to twist endings, a surprise plot twist that we’d never expect. So for a modern reader, the ending is a bit anti-climactic and I imagine some will find it disappointing. After all, so many stories end in this manner. But what the modern reader has to remember is that this story was written in 1926. This was before the “I see dead people” and “Who is Kaiser Soze?” stories of today. Now people expect a twist and are sometimes disappointed if there isn’t one.

So is there nothing for the modern audience? The ending isn’t entirely unexpected, but the vividness of the tale itself is something worth experiencing, as well. The framed story concept makes this even more interesting, because it seems as if we, the readers, are in a conversation with the narrator. He even addresses Eliot as if answering questions within the conversation itself, though we never see Eliot’s inquiries. We are Eliot.

This style leads to an atmosphere of excited dread. The narrator is conveying all of these terrible things he’s seen with specific details but also with the horrified enthusiasm of someone who has been fully and truly freaked out. A reader can’t help but keep reading faster in an effort to rush to the end to see what happens. I think this is a brilliant example of how to build tension in a first person narrative.

Of course, Lovecraft is renowned for his graphic descriptions of all manner of beastie. And “Pickman’s Model” is no slouch in this area either. But what I found is that Lovecraft is very sneaky. As the narrator is being shown the paintings in the personal gallery on the way down to the studio, the descriptions of the scenes are vivid and very detailed. Each room he goes through has more and more disturbing images and Lovecraft describes one or two pieces from each as we go along with the narrator. And they are very graphic. Yet when we get to the final room, the studio, and the final, horrible painting . . . there’s not much detail. It is a giant thing with red eyes, bony, scaly claws, a dog face, flat nose and curling lips. Oh and the body is caked with mold and the feet are half-hooved. And it’s gnawing on a human body, head first. But the description is almost skirted in favor of a ranting about the part that made it most gruesome – the painter’s technique. So the most horrible parts, the things that make it truly terrifying to the reader are left to the reader’s imagination. I find that brilliant, as well.

We have, I think, one or two more Lovecraft works to read later in the term. I’m looking forward to seeing how they compare to “Pickman’s Model” particularly stylistically.

I think humans have a number of fears which are universal. Some are the biggies: war, famine, pestilence. They’re global issues, community issues, and they’ve been around forever. We’ve heard stories, both real and fictional, about these things for millennia. Diary of Anne Frank, Saving Private Ryan, Red Badge of Courage, Angela’s Ashes, Outbreak, Andromeda Strain. They touch on our fears of destruction, of pain, of suffering. Those are deep-seated fears. But they’re also the ones that feel furthest away for most of us.

People in the United States, up until 2001, had never feared war on their soil. Most modern day people living in industrialized countries have little fear of famine or pestilence. So the movies and books which touch on these fears are still seen as entertainment. They’re far enough removed from our everyday lives that they’re not immediate. They’re almost not real.

The stories which hit closer to home are the ones that really scare us, because we have universal fears which are held very close to our souls. Abandonment, death, being alone, rejection, loss of independence (financial and personal), loss of family members, the unknown, failure. Weaving these fears into a story brings about a stronger reaction in the reader (or viewer). Why? Because they’re more real on a day to day basis.

Trusting in people could lead to abandonment, which would lead to being alone. Submitting a manuscript could lead to rejection (and, in reality, probably will at least for awhile). Random acts could lead to death, or failure, or a palpable loss. Stories about these things resonate with people because they’re even more universal than the biggies. These are things we deal with every single day as humans.

Zeroing in on these fears, as a writer, can be done with a sledgehammer or with a feather. Some of the creepiest stories seem inconsequential on their surface, but we walk away from them with their characters populating our thoughts and their circumstances weighing on our minds. What if that had been me? How would I have dealt with it? Would I have survived?

Good fear-raising stories make us question our own abilities to overcome our fears. They make us imagine how we might have come through the situation, if at all. But beyond that, a good story like that also often makes us see that our fears can be overcome. Can we overcome death? Not in real life. But we can keep our fear of it from controlling us – at least long enough to get away from the axe/chainsaw/sword/needle-wielding murderer.

Horror writing is, arguably, one of the more emotional types of writing. Because horror is the art of fear. A writer’s ability to reach out to the reader and draw out some of the basest fears is the art, like a dance. It isn’t about the blood and the gore. It’s about the deeper, emotional reaction to a metaphorical monster that frightens all of us.

Okay, maybe you don’t yet, but you will. I’m taking some classes toward my MFA in Writing  Popular Fiction at Seton Hill University (yes, I already have a MA from them. It’s a long story, don’t ask). One of the classes, Readings in the Horror Genre, requires that I post thoughts and observations on our readings on my blog. So if you see a bunch of (brilliant) posts on scary books or horror-ish topics, you’ll know why.

I’ll still be posting the remaining Trip Logs from Europe, it’s just going to take me awhile to finish them. We’ve still got one more post on the Netherlands, then probably three on London. Lots of pics too! So stay tuned :)

So I’m actually home now and have been for about a week. I’ve been trying to get caught up on things, which is why this has been so long in the making. But let’s have a look at Amsterdam, shall we?

We only made it into Amsterdam for one day, due to family events, weather, traffic and illness. (Yes, I was sick the entire time I was in Europe – lovely!). I really wanted to go to the Anne Frank House. I’d been there in the past and it’s a most amazing experience. When I was last there, they were building an annex onto the side of the building that was to have more information, exhibits, etc. So I wanted to see how that ended up. I’ve always been fascinated by the Anne Frank story – about all survivors’ stories, really. So I was quite disappointed when we rounded the corner on this bitterly cold day to see a line completely around the building. The metal and glass building you see in the photo is the new part they were building when I was there. So, still being sick, I didn’t want to stand out in the cold. Instead, we went to a little tea house which was actually just a regular cafe. We split an apple turnover and had Earl Grey tea.

We wandered around the city for a little while, then headed over to the Amsterdams Historisch Museum. This museum chronicles Amsterdam's growth from a tiny, swampy village to the modern city it is today, housing over 750,000 people. All of the information displays were in both Dutch and English, which was very helpful for me and probably stress-relieving for my husband. ;) There were paintings and artwork, as well as sociological exhibits, including a lot of information on the charitable organizations which helped the poor especially during the 1700s and 1800s.

I especially found the archeological displays interesting. In some cases, they’d found leather shoes from the 1200s! And it’s always interesting to look at artifacts that people hundreds of years ago used in their daily lives. It always jump-starts my imagination to consider what they might have been doing when they were wearing those shoes.

After, we wandered around a little more, taking photos and chilling out. We had dinner at a Mexican restaurant because I wanted to see what Dutch Mexican would be like. The food was good, but it’s the first time I’ve ever had to eat tacos with a knife and fork from the beginning! After the tacos are put together, they put cheese over the hard shell and then put it in the oven. Considering that all the Dutch folks I know use a knife and fork for everything (including French fries and pizza!), I really wasn’t that surprised. But it tasted good and that’s all that really matters!

Ahhh, but then… then I finally got to go to a brown cafe! My husband was born and raised in Amsterdam and he’s been to brown cafes before, but they’re not his thing. But ever since my first visit, I wanted to at least go into one and have that experience. He’d never go with me :p So finally I told him this trip that if he wanted to stand on the street and wait for me, that was fine, but I was going to go in. He went in with me.

It was tiny, with lots of green, red and gold alongside the Bob Marley posters. The upstairs seating area had seven tables crammed into about a twelve by twelve room. Sparkly holiday ornaments hung from the ceiling in – you guessed it – Jamaican colors. The walls were mirrored and the haze in the tiny room was like someone had lit a signal fire in the corner. On the menu, you could order actual drinks (coffee, tea, espresso, etc) along with weed or hash or a mix, loose in a bag. There was also the option of buying a joint: either weed or a mix of weed and hash. And did I buy anything? Well, I did buy something… but I’m not telling what! :)

Some photos of Amsterdam for your enjoyment:

So we only spent a few more days in Valles, but we were there for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, as well, which was very nice. It snowed again the night before Christmas Eve and then it was snowy and rainy on Christmas Day. Though it was breathtaking to see some of the vistas, it was very, very cold. And since I’d been sick since the day we arrived in Italy (and am still sick, writing this in London!), I’d been trying very hard not to go out for long periods of time. But the photo ops were irresistible!

And now, something funny. I believe I mentioned that people in that area speak both Italian and German. Now, in high school I took Latin and Spanish. In college I took French and about seven years ago I took a few Italian classes. So all my foreign language skills are in the Romance Languages. I’m not fluent in any of them, but my mouth, throat and voice box understand how to make the sounds required, including the rolling “r” and the lilting accent at the ends of words. But German… that’s a language that’s always eluded me. Truth be told, I never had much interest in learning it. But because my in-laws are all Dutch and the two languages are relatively close in sounds, they all speak German (rather than Italian). At any rate, I was trying my hand – or, rather, mouth – at German now and again. So I went to order some hot tea, which is what I was drinking for almost my entire stay there. And in German, hot tea is “heisse thee” which is pronounced very, very similarly to the English “iced tea.” I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this. So I (thought I) ordered heisse thee in German. I was pretty proud of myself for getting over my fear of looking stupid because I couldn’t speak German. I’m sure you can imagine my chagrin when what came to me was a small glass with cold, cold tea. I resolved to have learned Italian semi-fluently by the time I return. No more German for me!

So we did presents for the kids on Christmas Eve night and on Christmas Eve day everyone tried to take advantage of the last full day we’d be there, by getting out on the slopes. It was cold and rainy all day, though, so by lunchtime everyone was in the warm hotel bar. While we were ordering lunch, we noticed a helicopter in the parking lot across the little street. Over the next hour or so, we saw emergency vehicles bring volunteers from all around. There’d been an avalanche on the backside of the mountain. We didn’t learn details til later, but watched the helicopter disappear to the other side with rescue workers and return at least half a dozen times. At least two trips included dogs. It was really amazing to watch everyone mobilize in order to search and rescue, if necessary. We recognized that many of the emergency vehicles that arrived were from neighboring villages. The way the communities bind together in order to deal with an emergency is awe-inspiring.

Later, we spoke to one of the ski instructors who was part of the rescue effort and he told us that initially, there had been a set of ski poles found near the site of the avalanche, so everyone mobilized as if there were people trapped, though they found out relatively quickly that the poles had just been accidentally left behind and that no one had been in danger. I was very relieved to have heard this, because I couldn’t imagine how terrible it would have been to have learned that a loved one or friend had been trapped in that avalanche on Christmas Day.

The next morning, Carlita and Anita (half of the family team that runs the hotel) made sure we had a good breakfast as well as sandwiches for lunch on the road, then saw us off with hugs and kisses. Everyone at the hotel was so welcoming and friendly. Anita and one of the waitresses, Sabina, had a little bit of English and I helped them learn a little more while they encouraged me with German (not that it did much good, obviously! ;) ). I really felt as if I were visiting family, not just staying at some hotel in the mountains.

I’d love to organize a writing retreat up there during summertime. Anyone want to go to the Italian Alps and write?

On our way back, we passed some pretty sites. A few photos:

We found this little church down a pathway from a small parking area (a rest stop without facilities) on the side of the highway. It’s a functioning church, with services and events like any other church.