BOTTLED ABYSS--When Death is NOT the End

Benjamin Kane Ethridge, Bottled Abyss. Redrum Horror, June 2012. 332 pp. $12.99, trade paperback. ISBN-10: 0984751955; ISBN-13: 978-0984751952. Kindle edition, 280 kb. $2.99. ASIN: B0089DXI40

In Bottled Abyss, Benjamin Kane Ethridge takes upon himself an unenviable task. He sets out, not to re-interpret classical mythology, but to extend it wholesale into the twenty-first century. His landscape is the Southern California desert…where the River Styx, in some inexplicable way continues to flow. Charon, the Boatman, continues to exchange time-worn coins for transport of the recently dead across the river to an afterlife every bit as tenebrous and inconsequential as the Hades of Homer. Furies move seen and unseen among humans, seeking vengeance. And Nyx—or ‘Night’—continues to haunt the shadows, interfering with mortal lives and feasting on tragedy, suffering, and pain.

All of this is unknown to Herman and Janet Erikson, an increasingly estranged couple living on the perilous edge of aridity both physically and emotionally. They are struggling to reconstruct their lives following the death a year earlier of their only child in an apparently random hit-and-run, yet their own actions merely drive them further apart.

When Herman stumbles upon a strangely shaped bottle containing a thick brown liquid, however, things begin to change…and to change rapidly. Discovery follows discovery, death follows death, until Janet takes upon herself the role of the ancient Erynies—personifications of anger and persecution and vengeance—and seeks out those responsible for her daughter’s death. Along the way, she loses everyone and everything dear to her, including, at least for an eternal moment, her own self.  

At times visionary and apocalyptic (in the original sense of ‘to uncover, to discover’), at times grittily realistic and noir, Bottled Abyss is not an easy read in any sense. Its horrors amplify as the effects of the mysterious fluid in the bottle expand, touching more and more lives, devastating and destroying.

I have a couple of quibbles with the novel. There are a number of first-person passages, during which the narrator/thinker moves inexorably toward an inevitable and horrific death. Ethridge must simultaneously allow them to gradually discover their fates (in both senses of the word—‘fate’ and ‘Fate’) while remaining fundamentally unconscious of them. This requires him to have them speak in at times stilted ways at odds with the ceaseless flow of conscious and unconscious thought; and to make certain that they notice specific elements of their environment that the reader understands as foreshadowings but that the characters, left to their own devices, might not register as important.

In addition, there are a few sentence problems. A headlight “blares”; although given the elliptical nature of events and characters this might have been intentional, the sense of the context would suggest a typo for “glares” or “flares.” There is just enough momentary indecisiveness about meaning to stall the narrative unnecessarily. Later, “statute” appears instead of “statue” and the phrase “track homes” replaces the correct “tract homes.”

I mention these primarily to suggest that the story is enthralling enough, ambitious enough, and largely successful enough that such slight wobbles jar—everything else is handled so skillfully that small things seem large.

That said, my response to Bottled Abyss is overwhelmingly positive. It moves seamlessly from the mundane world of cause-and-effect to the world of gods and powers and magic. Rivers seem simultaneously to exist and not to exist; immortals become mortals and mortals, immortal. It is a fascinating, kaleidoscopic, exploration of worlds material and immaterial, with Herman and Janet enmeshed like unknowing flies in the web of the gods.

Recommended.

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Michael R. Collings is the Senior Publications Editor for JournalStone Publishing; an Emeritus professor of English from Pepperdine University; author of the best-selling horror novels The Slab and The House Beyond the Hill, as well as other novels and collections of short fiction, poetry, and literary essays; and an inveterate fan of all things grammatical and syntactical.

A Rose by Any Other Name--Some Types of Sentences

A sentence is a sentence is a sentence.  

Actually, it would be more to the point to paraphrase George Orwell’s trenchant comment in Animal Farm: All sentences are created equal, but some are more equal than others.

By this I mean that any sentence—and here I include fragments—may be effective when used in the right context. Every form of sentence structure offers something than none of the others do.

For example:

Simple Sentence: I read the book—Subject + Verb + [Completer].

This is the basic sentence in English. The first word establishes who is performing the action; the second identifies the action, and subsequent words or phrases can define a number of elements, in this case, to whom (or what) that action was done.

Such sentences are ideal for a quick, perhaps cutting, often startling statement of fact that in itself might create a climax in a paragraph, a passage, a chapter: “The butler did it!” No further discussion, no modification to limit the possibilities of meaning. Just a plain, straight statement. Such sentences are often perfect after a long passage of more complicated, more developed structures.

Compound Sentences: I read the book, and I saw the movie—Subject + Verb + [Completer] + [, and/but] + Subject + Verb + [Completer]

Here two simple statements have been coordinated using and, but, or, nor, yet, or so. Compound sentences allow writers to present two ideas as equal; whatever is on one side of the coordinating phrase (and the comma is a crucial part of that phrase) has precisely as much weight as the idea on the other side. Neither reading a book nor seeing a movie is preferable.

Of course, choosing a different coordinator shifts meaning. But indicates that two equal statements oppose or contradict each other: “I read the book, but I didn’t see the movie.” Simple opposition of equalities.

Lest anyone think, however, that because such structures are called by grammarians and linguists “simple” they are thereby simplistic. A series of simple coordinated sentences can go far in creating tone, feeling, mood, atmosphere, even in characterizing and defining speakers. Take, for example, the opening paragraph from Mark Twin’s Huckleberry Finn¸ Chapter 40:

WE was feeling pretty good after breakfast, and took my canoe and went over the  river a-fishing, with a lunch, and had a good time, and took a look at the raft and found her all right, and got home late to supper, and found them in such a sweat and worry they didn't know which end they was standing on, and made us go right off to bed the minute we was done supper, and wouldn't tell us what the trouble was, and never let on a word about the new letter, but didn't need to, because we knowed as much about it as anybody did, and as soon as we was half up stairs and
her back was turned we slid for the cellar cubboard and loaded up a good lunch and took it up to our room and went to bed, and got up about half-past eleven, and Tom put on Aunt Sally's dress that he stole and was going to start with the lunch, but says:

"Where's the butter?"

Everything is equal, coordinated. No single action, observation, or thought is any more important than another, even though several of the structures contain information that will influence the story. It is perfect…if your narrator is an uneducated boy who, unlike his friend Tom, reacts to things as he sees and hears them. He doesn’t plan, he doesn’t construct elaborate “effects.” Things simply are. He floats through time and space as unhindered as does the great river itself.

No one has ever sustained this kind of structural definition of character as masterfully as Twain.

Complex Sentences: I read the book before I saw the movie—Subject + Verb + [Completer] + Subordinator + subject + verb + [completer]

Notice that I chose not to capitalize the last three elements in complex sentences. I did so because the act of subordinating, of creating a complex sentence, automatically informs readers that one part is more important to the narrative than the other. “I read the book” is independent; it stands on its own and receives the most focus. “I saw the movie” is not dependent, contingent upon the first element and, without that first element, cannot stand as a sentence: “Before I saw the movie.” The word before requires more information than the clause can give it.

It is possible to reverse the order of clauses, but doing so still does not make the subordinated element more important than the independent one: “Before I saw the movie, I read the book.” Note two things. First, a comma is now necessary  to separate the two structures; and the fact of reading the book actually becomes even more emphatic.

Compound-complex Sentences: I read the book before I saw the movie, and I liked the book better even though the movie offered interesting visual insights— Subject + Verb + [Completer] + Subordinator + subject + verb + [completer] + Coordinator  ₊  Subject + Verb + [Completer] + Subordinator + subject + verb + [completer]

Here, the writer is balancing at least four separate thoughts, indicating through structure that two of them—“I read the book” and “I liked the book”—are exactly equal in force, while the remaining two—“I saw the movie” and “The movie offered insights”—are contingent upon the first two for their full meaning. There is a lot of information being presented, but chances are good that the reader will automatically use the compound-complex structure to create a mental hierarchy of importance.

In terms of writing skill, complex-compound sentences suggest greater sophistication on the parts of writer and narrator, greater awareness of how elements of the world fit together, and a greater sense of observation, discrimination (a much- and unfairly-maligned word, by the way).

Passive Sentences: The book was read by me—Completer + was + past-tense verb + [subject].

Passive sentences are also much maligned. I’ve seen any number of writing manuals and rule lists that begin with something like “Avoid the passive.”

In general that is good advice, if for no other reason than word count. “I read the book” is two words shorter than “The book was read by me,” and the difference lies in a prepositional phrase that may often be deleted: “The book was read.”

Now, however, there is no sense of who performs the key action. A passage written using active sentences tends to be stronger, more vigorous, more action-oriented (obviously), and readers generally have no difficulty in figuring out, in the words of William Lanham, a scholar from UCLA, “Who’s kicking Who?” (He follows that up with, “I know it should be whom, but that is just being pretentious.)

Who is going it? What is he/she/it doing? And to whom/what is it being done? Key questions in every sentence…except the passive.

Of course, there are times when the passive is entirely appropriate. “I was bitten by a ferret” suggests that the recipient of the action—I—is in some critical sense more important than the actor. We really don’t care much about the ferret—its home life, its struggles as a young ferretling, his motivation, his deep psychological traumas. I was bitten, for heaven’s sake!

If, however, there is something aberrant about the ferret, it might be wise to shift to active: “A rabid fetter bit me.” I’ve been bitten, bad enough; but the blasted ferret was rabid. That crucial point deserves first-place in the sentence.

The basic rule for passives, then, is straightforward: is the receiver more critical than the actor. If so place him/her/it first.

There is much more to be said about passive sentences, but in terms of how the structure works, this will have to suffice.

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There are two additional structures that can be of particular value in writing narratives, primarily because they not only contribute meaning and information (as do all sentences) but they also build or release suspense and tension, and control pacing in the story.

Loose Sentences: Simply put, in a loose sentence, the basic sentence is completed in the first phrase, even though the structure itself may continue with additional modification. If not controlled, loose sentences threaten to end up clattering aimlessly and bonelessly through piles of information, never giving readers any hint as to which bits and pieces are relevant or important. Consider the following:

I read the book by my favorite author in the new library down the street, across the block from the desolation of the burned-out rubble of the old library, built at the end of the Civil War and dedicated by General Ulysses S. Grant after the end of the war but before he became President of the United States.

Information there is aplenty, but which parts should readers retain as significant? After all, the sentence, shorn of modifications, merely states, “I read the book.” The rest is built of prepositional modifiers of key nouns in the previous prepositional phrases: by the A in the B of the C for the D between the E of the F and so on…. Such structures—shopping-bag sentences, one scholar calls them—can continue for as long as the prepositional phrases keep coming.

When handled more carefully, however, loose sentences are anything but loose. They may begin with a straightforward statement—subject + verb + [completer]—and continue with strings of modification, but the strings themselves may be arranged to create a rising motion in the story, or generate the sense that the action is speeding up. The following example is taken from “Space Opera,” a story of mine that will appear in a Lovecraft-in-Space anthology this fall:

He started to move closer to her, infusing his bodily stance with all of the subtle signals of hatred for her stubborn, presumptuous species that he could—tarsi fully extended, as if he would rip her body covering from whatever structures supported it; carapace divided just enough to reveal the ichor-green of his wings; mouthparts quivering with suppressed rage; eyen glistening as his compounds flared toward her.

The sentence is simple: “He started to move.” All that follows hinges upon that, but we know from the beginning the significant action and the specific actor—in this case an insectoid alien. If the sentence were to stand alone, it could probably be compressed into a two-word structure: “He moved.” Since subject and verb are parts of a much longer expression, however, the shift from “moved”—which identifies a particular, completed action—to “started to move” is warranted by the lengthy series of elements that must occur before he actually gets closer to her. The tail, as it were, that is wagging this short dog is itself an assemblage of phrases identifying precisely how he moves: “infusing his bodily stance,” which is further defined by the prepositional phrase “with all the subtle signals.” That, in turn, is amplified by a series of parallel noun phrases: “tarsi extended,” “carapace divided,” “mouthparts quivering,” and “eyen glistening” (in the context of the story, eyen is the correct word).

All of that, all of the detail and emotion and horror, is controlled by the initial phrase: “He started to move.”

On a less dramatic scale, and therefore perhaps more directly effective, here is a short but well-crafted loose sentence from Benjamin Kane Ethridge’s fine mythic/horror novel, Bottled Abyss:

He peeled off, weaving through traffic, looking for the next available exit, praying the fire had not spread to his closet, to the shoes. (223-224)

Again, the kernel structure is completed at once, in the first three words: “He peeled off.” Everything else modifies that statement through a series of subordinate clauses hanging on “weaving,” “looking,” “praying.” The final element is then sequentially modified/extended, bringing us from the vague generality of “traffic” to the increasingly specific and localized “exit” and “fire,” and finally to the rather rushed-seeming but appropriate compression of two prepositional phrases, “to his closet” and “to the shoes”; the lack of conjunction or subordinator (“that”) between them adds to the tension.  The shoes, by the way, play a significant role in the plot; hence the character’s sense of urgency in reaching them. Even though the structure is technically a simple sentence—Subject + verb + completer—it is complex in the levels of information that it conveys and perfectly appropriate to the heart-stopping anxiety the character experiences.

Periodic Sentences work in the opposite way. While there may be many words at the beginning (see the examples below), the sentence itself is not completed until the final syntactical unit. The author begins with a subordinate modifier, moves on to another, then another, then another, and so on until—finally—revealing the subject and action of the statement. By doing so, the author can generate interest, curiosity, suspense, and build toward a climax, a revelation, a discovery.

My favorite example of this kind of structure appears, not in prose, but in the opening lines of John Milton’s magnificent epic Paradise Lost: 

Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,  
Sing Heav'nly Muse….

The sentence continues for another few lines (which in fact construct a second crescendo for the sentence), but this is sufficient for my purposes here. Note that each of the first five lines begins with an unstressed syllable, creating the general effect of blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter): Of Man’s, Of that, Brought Death, With loss, Restore. Then suddenly, as if out of nowhere, the sixth line crashes down with three heavy stresses—Sing Heav’nly Muse—and at the same time completes the prepositional phrase that begins in the first line. By the time readers discover who (the Heavenly Muse) and what (sing!), Milton has presented all of the preparatory information necessary to know what his epic will celebrate: Adam and Eve’s disobedience, the Fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil, loss of Paradise, eventual restoration through Christ, and final unity of the faithful with God.

Milton’s age was one of intense interest in style. Poets, dramatists, preacher, politicians, scientists—nearly everyone involved in letters had opinions about the correct use of style. For the rigid Puritans, the plain style was best; present God’s words directly, simply, with no mediation between speaker and audience. Their obsession for simplicity was reflected in such activities as whitewashing interiors of medieval churches to remove distracting murals; crating away stained-glass windows (or in the worst cases, shattering them); dismantling or destroying elaborate, centuries-old organ cases; and replacing ornate pews with plain, often backless, benches. Nothing, whether in art, architecture, or speech, should come between God’s word and the congregant.

At the opposite extreme, High-Church Anglicans often argued that God’s word should be presented in the highest, the noblest, the most exalted of styles. Milton was clearly of this party. They found art and architecture a form of the sublime; contemplation of such beauty, they argued, would lead to God. On the continent, this attitude resulted in Baroque churches, in which every inch of every surface was painted, gilded, studded with sculptures and reliefs of angels, cherubs, so that everywhere the eye rested, it could revel in the amplitude of God’s abundance, power, grace, and creativity.

Even prose styles reflected the sense that words could almost literally carry listeners through this world and into the greater one beyond. In discussing the need for order in all things, for universal laws to govern every level of God’s creation and hold all in balance, the great prose stylist Richard Hooker wrote:

...Now if nature should intermit her course, and leave altogether though it were but for a while the observation of her own laws; if those principal and mother elements of the world, whereof all things in this lower world are made, should lose the qualities which now they have; if the frame of that heavenly arch erected over our heads should loosen and dissolve itself; if celestial spheres should forget their wonted motions, and by irregular volubility turn themselves any way as it might happen; if the prince of the lights of heaven, which now as a giant doth run his unwearied course, should as it were through a languishing faintness begin to stand and to rest himself; if the moon should wander from her beaten way, the times and seasons of the year blend themselves by disordered and confused mixture, the winds breathe out their last gasp, the clouds yield no rain, the earth be defeated of heavenly influence, the fruits of the earth pine away as children at the withered breasts of their mother no longer able to yield them relief; what would become of man himself, whom these things now do all serve? (Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book I, Chapter 3 [1593])

One. Periodic. Sentence!

Yet if we look at it closely, we can see that it is structured to contain and reflect the idea of universal order that it discussed. It begins with the broadest, most general of issues: If nature should cease following her own laws. Then it narrows: If the elements themselves lost their essential qualities. Then narrower and closer to earth: If heaven should dissipate; if the sun should cease to shine. And closer still (given the cosmology of the time): if the moon ceased following its orbit. And now, as he approaches his peroration, he allows the tempo to increase by the simple expedient of deleting the introductory if and linking everything to the world beneath the influence of the moon: if the moon should wander, the seasons become confused, the winds cease, the clouds become dry, the earth separate from God, the fruits of the earth wither….

And finally his core: What would become of man?

The universe must be orderly; otherwise humanity itself would perish. He not only argues for the point, but he demonstrates it in the structures of the sentence itself.

Granted, prose of this sort would be woefully out of place in contemporary narrative, although occasionally Lovecraft approaches this kind of intensity. But the underlying structure, the rhetorical period, can be useful. Here is another example from a draft of my Lovecraft-in-Space story:

As the Cwrth stood there in her triumph, her features twisted in pain, the grotesque swelling abruptly even larger, her covering more stretched, now burnished with a red deep beyond belief—even as she stood there; as a thin line formed from the jointure of her supports, questing upward with all of the determination of the universe of tentacles that now surrounded her world; as it quested upward and thickened until her covering split, some thing reached out with its own tentacles and wrapped itself around one of her supports and, still sticky and putrid with her scarlet ichor, lowered itself slowly, almost painfully, to the floor.

“Some thing reached out.” The core structure, reached simultaneously with the moment of highest emotional impact in the sentence. Note also how, after that simple sentence, everything diminishes, declines, slows, literally drops “to the floor.” Even the conclusion of that period is designed as part of the pacing of the language and the action of the story.

* * * * * * * *

A sentence is a sentence is a sentence.

Not for careful, alert, skillful, and effective writers.

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Michael R. Collings  is the Senior Publications Editor for JournalStone Publishing; an Emeritus professor of English from Pepperdine University; author of the best-selling horror novels The Slab and The House Beyond the Hill, as well as other novels and collections of short fiction, poetry, and literary essays; and an inveterate fan of all things grammatical and syntactical.

POINT-OF-VIEW and OTHER ODDITIES

In some ways, contemporary storytellers’ concerns with point-of-view are the great-great-great grandchildren (and a couple dozen more greats if you wish) of ancient writers’ concerns for Unity.

In the Poetics, Aristotle defined three Unities as essential for Tragedy:

Unity of Action, that is, that there be a single plot, with as few subplots as possible—ideally none;

Unity of Place, which meant that all of the action had to take place in the same area—no geographical wandering, and no multiple locales on a single stage;

and Unity of Time, which required that all of the actions take place within one day.

The theory behind the Unities was that it would be too difficult to maintain verisimilitude—and believability—if the audience were expected to accept too many separate plotlines about the same people at once; or that the same small space could represent both the endless steppes of Asia and the Roman forum; or that years might pass between the opening of act one and the closing of the final act.

Unfortunately, Aristotle’s writings about other narrative arts did not survive, and the idea of an extended fictional narrative, i.e., the novel, had not yet developed.

During the Renaissance, scholars and critics enamored with all things Greek and Roman, and especially with all things Aristotelian, restricted the unities even further. A truly classical drama, it was held, was composed of a single plot, taking place in a single location, and covering no more time than it took to perform.  In practical terms, the rise and fall of a great man (sorry, but Renaissance drama was sparse when it came to great women), as seen within a single room, taking three or four hours from onset to cataclysm to denouement.

Of course, in actual practice, such rigidly defined plays were exceptions rather than the rule, and most of the attempts at absolute Unity of Time, Place, and Action were concentrated in France. In the barbarian north, and particularly in the works of that wild genius William Shakespeare, the Unities began to crumble. Think of Hamlet, with its multiple subplots, its frequent change of setting, and its duration…at least long enough for a sea voyage to England. Or Macbeth, in which, according to the histories, events occurred over at least fifteen years.

During the seventeenth century, critics continued to debate the uses, the abuses, even the existence of the classical Unities in drama, which was good for narrative. As the reputation of Shakespeare grew, climaxing in some senses with a literal Shakespeare Cult in the mid-eighteenth century, it was generally agreed that certainly this writer, singing his “native woodnotes wild,” at least knew how to tell a good story, regardless of whether or not it covered the entire reign of a long-lived king.

By the time the first novels began appearing, then, it was at least possible for storytellers to break out of the classical mold and create a new kind of fiction. Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) took as its subject—as the title indicates—an entire year, 1665; and as its location all of London. His Robinson Crusoe (1719) might be considered as adhering to the unity of place for most of the tale, but it covers decades. And Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) ignored the unities almost completely.

While there may be—and often is—conflict over what constituted the first ‘true’ novel, the fact remains that, even though many initial readers considered these works by Defoe and Swift to be factual and historical, the first prose narratives threw over the sense of classical restriction. Writers could and did revel in plots and subplots. They could alter landscapes with a stroke of the pen or, as did Swift, invent new ones at need. They could take years, decades, lifetimes to complete their primary actions. Or longer. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-1767) is ostensibly the narrative of a man’s life, but he is not even born until the third of nine volumes.

Over the next centuries, the limitations on fiction writers diminished even further. Gothicism, Romanticism, and other nineteenth-century modes allowed writers to exercise their imaginations to unforeseen levels. And even though there were attempts at the end of the nineteenth century to restrict storytelling to what actually could occur in the real world—Realism and  Naturalism—genres such as Science Fiction and Fantasy, and eventually Horror, were too strongly embedded in readers’ minds to be ignored.

Essentially, it was “good-bye” Classical unities to the extent that they impinged on fiction.

With one exception…or rather, with one non-exception.

Aristotle wrote primarily of drama, and of one form of drama at that. He mentions Epic and Comedy, but—because fiction as a genre had not fully separated from history, and history itself could be written in either prose or verse—he does not discuss prose fiction.

And here, I think, we come up against a ‘virtual’ fourth Classical unity, one implicit in dramatic presentations: Unity of Point-of-View.

Except for very limited experimental theaters explicitly dedicated to exploring point-of-view, drama (at least live drama) restricts itself to a single perspective: the objective perspective of the audience. If the dramatist wishes to break that objectivity and allow viewers to enter into a character’s thoughts, there is no alternative except the soliloquy, in which the actor steps forward a few paces, speaks from behind a hand, or in some other way indicates that the words about to be spoken are shared only with the audience; other characters will have no access to them.

Perhaps because the objective point-of-view is implicit in drama, Aristotle might have felt no need to discuss a unified point-of-view of presentation. But as soon as prose fiction fully separated itself from both verse-narrative and drama, it suddenly became possible for authors to do more than present objective, externalized characters…them, as it were.

Instead, prose allowed for several possibilities, one of which—third-person point-of-view—became the standard. There are several reasons for this.

First-person—I, me, my, we, us, our—certainly has its proponents in contemporary fiction. It has certain advantages: immediacy; a kind of bonding or melding with the reader; a sense of intimacy, the feeling that things are happening or have happened to a consciously attentive character; and a certain narrative slickness in that the linguistic capacities of a narrator automatically lend themselves to characterizing the tone, atmosphere, and mood of the story. A witty first-person narrator creates an entirely different kind of story than, say, a first-person narrator-under-suspicion—one who readers gradually discover isn’t to be trusted and may not be telling the truth. With that realization, the feel of the entire story may shift radically.

First-person has disadvantages as well. It becomes possible for readers to care more about the story-teller than about the story, to become obsessed with the I to the point that other elements of story disappear. It is also extremely difficult to withhold information from readers who have access to the narrator’s mind and inner-most thoughts. In one mystery novel I read years ago, the narrator discovers the identity of the murderer half-a-dozen chapters before the end, meets the murderer several times thereafter, and never once, apparently, thinks “Good grief, this man is a murderer!” When she finally reveals the name, readers feel cheated and manipulated, and the story falters if not fails. Finally, except for a few note-worthy stories by Lovecraft and others, readers can pretty much assume that the narrator—who is after all speaking either in present or (more often) in past tense—will still be alive! So much for suspense.

Second-person point-of-view—You, yours—is even more problematical, since it requires that readers accept everything said about the pov character as accurate of and appropriate to them. The first time I came across the issue occurred when I was teaching Freshman Composition at the University of California, Riverside. The program director drew our attention to a sentence from a student essay: “Wearing a dress enhances your femininity.” He had circled it in red (he was old-school that way) and written in the margin: “I don’t have any femininity, and if I did, I wouldn’t want it enhanced.” Questions of political correctness and pop psychology aside, his point is valid. The statement, couched in second-person, assumed things about the audience—the entire audience—that were true, if at all, of only part of it. With the exception of my children’s obsession with Choose Your Own Adventure paperbacks decades ago, I’ve rarely met readers who felt entirely comfortable with second-person point-of-view; truth to tell, it makes me distinctly uncomfortable, as if the writer is taking no pains to involve me intimately in a story. As often as not, the you seems to refer to some other, non-present observer.

That leaves third-person point-of-view—he, she, it (especially fun in horror), they, them. There are a number of variations which I don’t want to get into at this point: objective, subjective, omniscient, past, present, and future. What I am most interested in is the sense that at this juncture, we arrive again at the question of Unities, this time Unity of Point-of-View.

I is specific and direct; only one narrator is possible (except, perhaps, in certain kinds of psychological horror). You is equally specific and direct; the narrator speaks directly to the reader. But with he, she, it, they, and them the author suddenly has tremendous freedom. A novel might have a dozen, a score, multiple scores of characters (thinking of The Stand and such books here) and the author is free to tell the story from the point-of-view of any of them.

As we know, however, with great freedom comes great responsibility. Here, in fact, we come to the key issue of Unity of Point-of-View: just as classical audiences did not expect to have to imagine a variety of landscapes on a single stage, or an action—a play—covering decades while they sat there for only a few hours, or the machinations of several plot lines simultaneously, so contemporary audiences, in general, expect to follow the thoughts and actions of a single character at a time.

This does not mean that, once a novel begins from one character’s perspective, it cannot shift. Many fine works move effortlessly from character to character.

But—at least in the case of the most successful—the shift from one perspective to another other does not take place within a single passage, be that passage a sentence, a paragraph, a section, or a chapter. Fine writers have explored the possibility of the narrator skipping from character to character more rapidly than might seem feasible and have succeeded with it; but by and large they are exceptions.

More usually, authors allow readers to settle in a bit, to get used to the particular character as pov character, then orchestrate shifts when the story requires them.

Sometimes, though pov shifts creep into stories without authors noticing. In a section told from the perspective of She, for example, She might say something, and the author notes that “He agreed with her wholeheartedly.” And possibly without intending to, the author has jerked readers from her mind and inserted them, without any warning, into his. Then the next sentence, and several sentences thereafter might focus again on She. Another abrupt shift of pov.

It’s a small point, to be sure, but such moments do violate the sense of unity of point-of-view that helps create and maintain verisimilitude in fiction. And they might easily be eliminated with minor revisions.

The author might choose to remain entirely within her consciousness, in which case the key sentence might read something like: “He seemed to agree with her wholeheartedly.” Less dogmatic, to be sure, but possible. There are many ways in which his ‘seeming’ might be noticeable to her

Or, to work on a different level, the author might choose to have her notice specific elements of his behavior that warrant the assumption that he agrees: “He nodded vigorously, grinning widely the whole time.” She has seen an objective, external, observable action, and she has processed its ramifications. We understand that he agrees, but the entire process has taken place within a restricted third-person point-of-view.

All of this might seem a bit tedious just to discuss a relatively small issue dealing with point-of-view; but with enough slips like the one above, readers may easily become disoriented, distracted. Imagine the consequences of a paragraph in which He (let’s call him ‘Arnold’) is the pov character. Arnold does this. Then he does that. He walks across the room and helps himself to a drink. He generally behaves in a way offensive to and disrespectful of his host.

The next paragraph begins, “He bristled.” Then he paces back and forth, hands clasped firmly behind his back.  He coughs nervously several times. He does a few more things indicating agitation and anger, and then finally the author says, “William could hold himself in not longer. ‘Get out!’”

Hmmm. And all this time, the readers though he was Arnold! A shift in point-of-view, without a careful redefinition of the pronoun he results in confusion. Readers have to back-track to be certain that they have actors and actions clearly delineated.

Or perhaps they choose not to back-track at all. They simply quit reading. And the story fails.

All of this is not to say that we should return to the absolutism of classical literary theory and demand Unity of Point-of-View in every story. It is, however, to say that writers need to be aware of when and how they shift perspectives within a story, making every effort not to lose readers through inadvertency or lack of care.

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Michael R. Collings, Senior Publications Editor for JournalStone Publishing and best-selling author of novels, short fiction, poetry, and literary studies, posts reviews here, at journalstone.com, and at hellnotes.com.

And the World Ends...or Doesn't

Richard Salter, ed. World’s Collider: A Shared World Anthology. Nightscape Press, 13 July 2012. 470 pp. $7.99 trade paperback. ISBN-10: 1938644018; ISBN-13: 978-1938644016. Kindle edition: Nightscape Press, 29 June 2012. 247 kb. $2.99. ASIN: B008GG1WU2

Zelazny, Trent. Butterfly Potion. Nightscape Press, 30 June, 2012. 92 pp. $7.99 trade paperback. ISBN-10: 1938644018; ISBN-13: 978-1938644016. Kindle edition: Nightscape Press, 29 June 2012. 247 kb. $2.99. ASIN: B008GG1WU2

It used to be that nightmare tales concerning CERN’s Large Hadron Collider concentrated on the possibility/probability that scientific experimentation with subatomic particles might inadvertently create a black hole that would quickly expand; end all life as we know it; and engulf the planet, the solar system, the galaxy, and—worst-case scenario, of course—the entire universe…or universes, whichever was most applicable.

Now, thanks to Richard Salter’s remarkable shared-universe anthology,  World’s Collider, we know that there is indeed something worse to contemplate: what if the accident does not create a black hole but instead opens a rift between our reality and somewhere-other. What if it does not mercifully annihilate all human life but rather creates an opening through which—in a Lovecraftian Great Old Ones fashion—something huge and terrible and indescribable struggles to emerge? What if its presence is adumbrated by multiple smaller shifts in reality, by creatures that, though smaller and ultimately mortal, are nonetheless themselves terrible and indescribable? What if it dooms survivors to decades of fear and terror and destruction, to dreams and visions that might or might not reflect reality…if reality even exists any more?

The tales in World’s Collider explore all of these and multiple other potentialities through the medium of eighteen inter-connected short stories. In this it differs from conventional shared-world anthologies, in which authors accept the premise of a particular landscape or environment—often based on another author’s fictions—then move off in their own directions to explore individual characters, themes, etc. An excellent example of this kind of story-telling occurs in Paul Genesse’s several volumes of The Crimson Pact (2011-2012)—each story takes as its base the cataclysmic battle between humans and demons in the first story of the first volume, but the separate stories themselves may or may not be linked.

World’s Collider goes beyond this level of interrelatedness to incorporate recurring characters and what is essentially a single narrative, although one at times as broken, fragmented, and distorted as the world in which it occurs. As each carefully structured and meticulously placed story progresses, readers become gradually aware that there is a direction, that seemingly minor events or characters in one story might return with increasing significance, that what appears phantasmagorical in one story (a train that runs on tracks made of bone, for example) is in fact a critical part of the ultimate resolution.

And there is a resolution. Nothing is explained, of course, because in the universe(s) of World’s Collider nothing is ultimately explicable. But some puzzles are resolved, some questions answered, some sense made out of the senseless…and, in much the manner of Reign of Fire, remnant humanity is allowed to begin again.

I’ve not mentioned any stories in particular, in part because each is strong in its own right and each contributes to the whole in a way unusual in anthologies. However, for reasons external to the novel/anthology, I would like to point out one as fascinating.

Trent Zelazny’s “Black Whispers” is an ideal example of how the Collision has effects far beyond Europe. The story takes place in the southwestern U.S. The central character—drunk and maudlin over the death of his wife several years before—discovers a peculiar structure in the middle of the desert. He sticks his hand into it. Nothing. He thrusts his face into it. Nothing. By the time he has returned to the local bar for another drink, however, his hand and face have begun itching…furiously. Accompanied by other bar-regulars, including a beautiful woman, he returns to the object where, through a seemingly innocuous action, things from ‘out there’ are invited in, with devastating consequences.

The story fascinates me for the same reason that Stephen King’s Desperation (1996) and Richard Bachman’s The Regulators fascinate me. In these two novels, King/Bachman explores two different but connected versions of reality, landscape and characterization, and horror. In fact, he uses the same menu of names in both, attaching them to wildly different characters. The books are clearly separate but in an eerie way conjoined, just as Zelazny’s “Black Whispers” and his self-standing novella Butterfly Potion are clearly separate but eerily conjoined. Both have drunks as central characters; both have visions of a lost wife that trigger and nourish binges; both begin in a bar surrounded by desert; both inflict physical and mental pain on the main character; and both conclude elliptically. One is dark because it explores the darkness of the human psyche obsessed with guilt and loss; the other is dark because it explores not only that darkness but the darkness of horror, of the unknown and the unknowable. It is as if Zelazny looked at the same character—or startlingly similar character—and envisioned one in a world essentially like ours and the other in a world fundamentally and catastrophically unlike ours.

In a sense, the two stories allow readers to explore not only the characters and their worlds but the imagination that results in either tragedy or horror.

Much more could be said about World’s Collider and Butterfly Potion, but I will end by noting that both are products of Nightscape Press, which recently published remarkable Peter N. Dudar’s A Requiem for Dead Flies. Three at-bats; three home-runs.

Highly recommended (all of them).

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Michael R. Collings is a best-selling novelist, essayist, and poet. His writings are available here at Collings Notes and as the website for JournalStone Publications (journalstone.com), where he serves as Senior Publications Editor.

Hal Bodner, THE TROUBLE WITH HAIRY

Hal Bodner. The Trouble with Hairy. Phantom Hollow Publishing, 2012, 432 pp. $14.99, trade paperback. ISBN ISBN-10: 1469926970; ISBN-13: 978-1469926971

        Kindle edition, 687 kb. $3.99. ASIN: B0074V7NXA.  

If The Trouble with Hairy were a movie, it would probably be rated ‘R’—for language, for violence, and for sexual content.

And even as a novel, I would suggest that it merits an ‘R’ rating as well—for riotous, for raucous, and for ribald.

The basic plot of the novel is serious. Someone, or some thing, is brutally, viciously, and gorily murdering gay men; and it is up to captain Clive Anderson and his compatriots, coroner ­­­­­­­­­­­­­Becky O’Brien and city manager Pamela Burman, to discover what the victims had in common and, from that clue, who the murderer is.

But, of course, there is more to this novel than that single rather noir plot. The setting is West Hollywood…and an over-the-top West Hollywood at that (if such a thing is even possible). True, three men have died, but public outcry ignores that awful fact and concentrates on the even more savage, even more despicable, even more horrifying murder of over thirty—over thirty—pets.

Pets?

Well, this is after all a version of West Hollywood which the mostly useless mayor, Daniel Eversleigh, has publicly designated as a safe haven for cuddly creatures. So Anderson is charged with a dual task. In his spare time, as it were, to track down the killer of the three men; but as a matter of principle see to it that the ruthless slayer of cats, dogs, and one pet pig is brought to justice…even if that means a public hanging and emasculation.

Things are not totally grim for poor Anderson, however, because he has several additional helpers: Chris Driscoll, a centuries-old vampire; his century-old ‘renfield,’ the precocious, slightly perverse, and often precious Troy Raleigh; and his web of human and non-human contacts, including a vampire even older than he is.

When it becomes clear that the murderer—or is that murderers?—is/are werewolves, the entire assemblage of humans and non-humans, straights and gays, males and females (and one transvestite) must ignore their differences and work together to solve the crimes.

Unfortunately, that involves wholesale wreckage of several apartments, treated with all of the intricate detail of thirties screwball-comedy-cum-slapstick-farce; an uproarious (in several senses) scene between a naïve werewolf, a waiter wielding a silver tray, and an underdone steak in an up-scale restaurant; several traffic accidents that essentially pulverize cars and undeserving public statuary; the wholesale conflagration of pigeons roosting on the wrong power line; and more witty badinage than any of the situations could logically call for.

The climactic scene involves a renegade werewolf that despises gays of any species; a pseudo-vampiric, quasi-immortal renfield desperately trying to regain his lover’s affections; the cross-dressing lover of an outcast gay werewolf; and a silver-plated umbrella studded with silver flatware super-glued to the ferrule. When one character inadvertently inserts the umbrella into…but no, you’ve got to read that passage for yourself to believe it.

As outrageously comic as it is, The Trouble with Hairy contains at heart a serious exploration of how individuals handle differences in others, how prejudices hamper and distort relationships, and how understanding truth can assuage even the most desperate inner fears. The novel does not preach; the tone is wrong for that. But as each character discovers important things about himself/herself/itself, readers can watch those relationships grow, develop, and (in all but one instance) alter individuals for the better.

Above all, however, The Trouble with Hairy is a romp, a gambol, a frolic. And it should be enjoyed as such.

Recommended.

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Michael R. Collings is a best-selling novelist, essayist, and poet. His writings are available here at Collings Notes and as the website for JournalStone Publications (journalstone.com), where he serves as Senior Publications Editor.

About Ellipses....

In reading manuscripts over the past few months, the single most frequent area of difficulty I have noted deals with those pesky little points, the ellipsis.

While they may seem minor in big picture of a novel, or even within a short story, they are important for what they say and how they say it. So it might be interesting to take a few moments and review what ellipses are…and what they aren’t.

Many years ago, when I was first married and just beginning my career teaching composition and creative writing, my wife and I had a number of enjoyable exchanges about grammar and usage. She is very much a people-person; most people she meets feel like she is an old friend within a few minutes. She is easy-going, informal, a delight in every way.  

I am not. I suspect that I come across as stiff, formal, even snobbish—when in reality I am shy beyond belief and, for the past three decades, increasingly deaf. I do not mix well with groups. And in my writing, I am formal, considered, and as correct as possible.

So....

The fateful day came when she was writing her first letter to her mother after our wedding. I was, as was typical, grading papers. When she finished her letter she handed me the pages to me and asked if there was anything I wanted to add. Red pencil in hand, I took it and circled all of the ‘errors’ in it, wrote a hasty note to my mother-in-law, and handed it back. My wife shook her head sadly (something I became used to in the ensuing years) and mailed the letter.

It took ten years for my mother-in-law to dare to write to us. During that time, she would only telephone.

The consequence of academic humor.

Now, this anecdote actually does have bearing on my stated topic: ellipses. Most if not all of the ‘errors’ I circled in my wife’s letter were of two sorts—repeated punctuation and ellipses.

When Judi writes, she uses multiple exclamation marks to indicate excitement, hers and the reader’s. Like this!!!!!!!! Or multiple question marks to suggest incredulity or—again—excitement. Really?????

She would give me rough drafts to check. I would dutifully remove all but one exclamation mark or question mark, according to the rules of grammar. She would take my revision and, grinning, add them back in, according to the rules of Judi.

When Judi and I joked about end punctuation, there were hard-and-fast rules of grammar to rely on. When it came to those pesky points, however, things suddenly seemed less fixed. After all, if !!!! could represent an extreme of excitement and passion and ???? a parallel extreme of confusion and bewilderment, why couldn’t ………indicate a pause…a long, long pause.

In fact, the two situations are quite similar.

Question marks and exclamation marks, like periods (full-stops, in British parlance) are discrete bits of punctuation that in general have a single function: they tell us that a sentence (command or question) is finished. Colons and semi-colons have equivalent functions; under certain conditions, they tell us that two statements have a close logical or syntactic relationship to each other, and that the first of the two has just ended.

No problem.

But ellipses…, well, they obviously work on slightly different levels than the others, even though technically, they are a single, discrete mark of punctuation as well.

What? you might ask. How can three be one?

It’s quite simple.

An ellipsis is made up of three—and only three—points. They are not periods; in fact, some computers and printers have special symbols for ellipses. Some automatically replace three manually-entered periods in sequence with three smaller, compressed dots. That set of three is considered a single unit.

And it is a highly adaptable and useful unit.

With it, writers may indicate that elements are missing in a quotation, for example. Ethical writers will be careful that the deletions do not alter the meaning of the quotation in any way, merely remove unneeded information to highlight what is critical; less ethical writers might chose to shift the purpose of the original words, at times even negating it. We’ve all seen reviews such as this—“This is…a masterful re-creation of…time and place.” Perhaps we’ve wondered what those three dots were replacing. Something like, “This is not a masterful re-creation of any conceivable time and place.”

Writers may be unethical. Ellipses are not. They simply indicate that something has been left out.

Or that the sentence is not finished, that it has simply trailed off into….

But wait. There are four marks at the end of that last structure. Yes. Three points for the ellipses, to indicate that the thought is incomplete, and a fourth point to complete the structure containing that thought. That fourth point is not part of the ellipsis; it is a period.

And that is it. Three points, or three points and a concluding mark of punctuation. Nothing more. Nothing less.

If the omitted material occurs in the middle of a compound structure, an appropriate comma may follow: “Tell me if you took that cookie or…, and don’t give me that expression!” or “‘I know I’ve seen you before…,’ she said.”

The conventions governing ellipses apply as well to the other concluding marks of punctuation. It is possible to omit material at the end of one sentence, then continue the next sentence following a semicolon: “I only saw three people…; I swear I only saw three.” Or to conclude a question with omitted material: “Did she tell you that I …?” Or an exclamation mark: “If you don’t leave this instant, I’ll…!”

In each structure the convention is the same. An ellipsis of three points followed by concluding punctuation.

Occasionally writers wish to include fragments of sentences, as when reproducing bits of overheard dialogue. Again, the ellipsis comes to the rescue:

“…Wouldn’t have believed it if….”

“…Never expected him to….”

“…This world coming to anyway when…?”

Note that the punctuations marks provide a wealth of information about the fragments. The quotation marks tell us that they are quotations; characters external to the action are being overheard by the narrator or narrative voice, but their communications are not complete. Such structures may provide a quick sketch of a mob’s emotional responses to an action or character, among other things.

The ellipses remind us that we are not to expect complete communication, complete thoughts; rather, the phrases merely give us an estimate of the entire utterances. And—as with all ellipses—there are three dots.

The capitalizations do not indicate that the speakers’ sentences begin at that point; the quotation marks and the ellipses tell us that we are breaking in on a speech line. However, regardless of the fact that a character’s thoughts and, perhaps, personality are being captured by a fragment, the author is nonetheless creating complete structures; they begin with a capitals and end with concluding punctuation.

The terminal ellipses confirm the fact that we are not hearing all of the communication, just the bit that the author believes will create the requisite effect.

Much is being said in few words, and several levels of communication are being explored—speaker, narrator (who is not the author and who thus does not have to complete the fragments) and author, who has independent structures to close and does have to complete them.

As with many of the ‘rules’ of English grammar, the effective use of ellipses ultimately make sense when broken down into a few easily remembered points.

1.      There are only three points in any ellipsis;

2.      Given their position in structures, ellipses may be followed by commas, semi-colons, question marks, exclamation marks, or other appropriate punctuation;

3.      And, when the structure concludes with a full-stop/period, there are not four elliptical points; there are still only three, along with the concluding period.

Useful things, those pesky dots…!

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Michael R. Collings--a bestselling novelist, poet, essayist, and literary critic--is the Senior Publications Editor for JournalStone Publications. This essay is also available at: journalstone.com.