It was right there, in the description of the item in my Amazon cart; it was in parenthesis: (The Oprah Winfrey Book Club)--and, after a few clicks and an innocuous transfer of some money-numbers on a computer screen, the book was mine and it was on its way. Over the next couple of days, as I awaited the book's arrival, I had to wonder what I'd done. Was I actually going to like this book or was I going soft, like a piece of fruit being tossed (and dropped a few times) around the library by a couple of bored high-school kids that don't understand why anyone would read the book when you can just watch the movie? I'd been told to check out Cormac McCarthy several times over the past few years and I'd been putting it off. I like stories of the macabre, I told myself. I'm not mainstream. I don't like the sort of books that populate the shelves of Barnes and Noble. (Although I couldn't quite stifle that voice in the back of my head that kept whispering: What about King, you idiot. How much more mainstream can you get, you hypocritical bastard.) I thought that if Oprah liked it, the woman adored by so many middle-aged woman across America, it probably wasn't for me. When the book arrived, sure enough, there it was: that great big gleaming O sticker, stuck to the front of my new book like a tumor, a mark that, to me, was as glaring and hideous as a scarlet A. I took the book to work with me, shamefully hiding the Oprah Book Club sticker with my fingers, and I read the first 50 pages or so. I read some more at lunch. I was intrigued; I was curious; I was drawn into the world of the book. I hadn't imagined a place so perversely dark and hopeless, so vague and yet so very real--so very human. I forgot about that little sticker on the front cover and I finished the book in a day and I immediately looked up Oprah's Book Club--what other kinds of things were on that list? What was I missing? "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy is a very good book. Its subject matter is most decidedly horror, but its style and restraint are the qualities of good literature. It chronicles the journey of a man (never named) and his young son as they travel through a world after some sort of apocalyptic disaster (never explained). All we know is that it's cold, food is extremely scarce, and everything is in ruins, covered in ash and falling to pieces. McCarthy's sparse writing style works perfectly to convey the desperate numbness of humanity reduced to a state of aimless survivalist. People are kept locked in basements like cattle to be eaten by other people; a woman gives birth to a baby and roasts it on a spit for dinner with her male companions; all the plants and birds and everything is dead. It is a bleak world and a bleak story, but with a lot of heart and much to say about the nature of altruism and the human spirit. Now, I've looked through Oprah's list of books from the past few years and most of what's listed there are not of much interest to someone like me who loves the horror genre and loves subversive fiction (besides a few works of Faulkner), but I have to say it is a solid list of 'literary' pieces of writing that I'm sure are important and powerful in the canon. I must say, my respect for Oprah has jumped considerably after looking over her list of books and knowing that she actually reads and encourages others to read--in a society that is becoming more and more illiterate and loosing its historical memory, anyone totting the value of the written word is a commendable and upstanding member of the human race in my eyes. Read "The Road." It is a wonderful piece of literary horror fiction.
2 Comments
There's a problem I've been having, a problem that runs through my writing like some kind of insidious thread, that, once pulled, begins to unravel all those carefully constructed sentences and metaphors. Several problems, really, but a unique one in particular that I struggle with: that of making characters relate-able and sympathetic to my readers. There's a dark streak in me; I know it's there; I'll admit it. It's the side of human nature that has always fascinated me, that has drawn me like that proverbial moth to that proverbial flame--the dark side of the human condition that, in my struggle to be as open-minded in my view of the world as possible, I have begun to under-appreciate. I have been known to say (most often at parties after a few) that all people are capable of acts some might label as "unspeakable". That's right, ALL PEOPLE. We are all capable of the act of murdering another human being and we've all had thoughts--fantasies even--about doing it. I firmly believe this to be true; we are animals; we can be broken down; our facades of civility, our protective masks worn in our world of human-constructed society, can be worn away--scratched away like the silvery stuff on a lottery ticket that shows us that we really have lost the race; we can be stripped down and driven to perform those "unspeakable" acts by the pressures of our base instincts versus our socially-constructed needs. What's worse, we can begin to lose it without even knowing it.
I wrote a story, a few months back, a flash fiction piece, in about an hour, in a random moment of inspiration, and MicroHorror published it: I Used to Find Things. It's about a young boy who plays by himself in the woods behind his house and starts to see some bad things and feel some bad things about the woods. I used to play by myself in the woods behind my house growing up in much the same way. What struck me, is a comment left on the site by jsorensen that mentions the underlying plot in the piece as "the developing dark side of the boy." This got me wondering--am I writing about the birth and growth of my own "dark side"? To some extent, I believe this to be true--at least, in the developing awareness of my personal dark side. The problem is, I didn't see this element in the story when I wrote it. I saw the boy as an innocent stumbling into a dangerous world. Jsorensen goes on to say, "a part of me can empathize with the boy but hopefully not too much…". The problem I have, then, is that when I want to write from the point of view of a disturbed character (which I guess I do since a lot of my characters seem to have this problem and what does this say about me?) I still have to be able to make him or her a rational human being with compassion and traits that make people able to feel for my character. How do you make someone feel for a character who murders somebody or purposefully steals and does a lot of drugs and stuff like that? The answer: you have to show him/her doing kind things that contrast with their detestable ones and show how they began to do these things. The keyword is, of course, "show". If you show your character doing something horrible and then just say 'by the way this is the reason,' you're not doing your job as a writer and storyteller. My issue is in accessing the 'dark side of humanity' while still evoking compassion in my readers. I'll work on it. |
"Unrelenting Horror"- FREE!An award-winning author known for blending elements of fantasy with horror in his surreal, literary style. Author of WITHIN, A GAME FOR GODS and VIOLENT HEARTS.
New Releases:
|