On a Dark and Narrow Way

Recently, Madge Simon asked me if I would be interested in writing an article on Dark Poetry for her column in the Newsletter of the Horror Writers Association. I gladly obliged, and the article just appeared in the September issue. With her kind permission, I am reprinting it here, along with several of the poems discussed.

On a Dark and Narrow Way

It’s a pleasure writing something about Dark Poetry rather than the more restrictive Horror Poetry, for the simple reason that I’ve only been writing horror poetry for perhaps the past fifteen years or so but dark poetry for most of my creative life.

For me, the distinction between the two is fluid and frequently depends upon my purposes and audiences. I consider the pastiches I’ve done of Lovecraft and Poe (such poems as “The Dweller on the Edge of Day,” “Night’s Plutonian Shore,” and “The House Beyond the Field”) primarily as horror for the simple reason that they are based on specific images, characters, or landscapes already made accessible by the earlier authors. The context—in the case of all three poems, In Darkness Drawn, a chapbook to be distributed at the World HorrorCon 2008—impelled me to focus on creating a certain texture through words and structures.

Because the things—the things—the poems were talking about do not exist (the contemporary hubbub about the imminent zombie apocalypse notwithstanding), they seemed most effective when the verse forms were familiar to readers, as real as possible. In each case, stanzaic, metered verse with a carefully chosen rhyme scheme was selected as a vehicle, first to introduce readers into the world of poetry, in which data and facts are secondary to image and emotion; and then into a world of horror, in which the primary images have no direct correspondent in objective experience. The intent was to immerse readers comfortably into one imaginative universe before exploring a second.

Because of the two-step distancing in horror poetry (and for that matter, in science fiction and fantasy) most of my distinctively horror poems are narrative—either overtly, as they introduce a character and take him/her/it through a narrowly limited situation; or covertly if the character is not directly identified but its outré nature is implied, as in “The Dweller on the Edge of Day.”

The third element that helps me identify horror poetry is language. In a very real sense, horror literature of any sort depends more obviously on manipulation of language than do other forms. As an exercise to prove the point, I gave a presentation at World HorrorCon 2012 in which I reproduced a paragraph from Lovecraft’s “The Picture in the House”—admittedly prose but of a texture and rhythmic intensity that almost approaches poetry. In the original, the second paragraph reads:

Most horrible of all sights are the little unpainted wooden houses remote from travelled ways, usually squatted upon some damp, grassy slope or leaning against some gigantic outcropping of rock. Two hundred years and more they have leaned or squatted there, while the vines have crawled and the trees have swelled and spread. They are almost hidden now in lawless luxuriances of green and guardian shrouds of shadow; but the small-paned windows still stare shockingly, as if blinking through a lethal stupor which wards off madness by dulling the memory of unutterable things.

Specific words stand out, immediately identifying the passage as horror, even though it is just about a simple landscape: horrible, remote, travelled, squatted, gigantic, squatted (as if once were not enough), crawled, swelled, lawless, luxuriances, shrouds, shockingly, lethal, stupor, madness, unutterable, things.

Then, to demonstrate how critical this vocabulary is to the story, I ‘rewrote’ the paragraph, toning things down a bit:

The most disagreeable sights of all are the small weathered wooden cottages far from the highways, usually set on some grassy hill or angled against large boulders. For more than two centuries, they have sat there, while foliage has spread and trees have grown larger and larger. Now they are almost screened in by an unfarmed bounty of green and shadows that seems to supervise them; but the small-paned windows still watch fearfully, as if looking askance through a disinterest that keeps mental instability away by putting the damper on reminders of things that are too unpleasant even to talk about.

The technical difference is that my version takes longer by about ten words, but the difference in atmosphere, tone, feeling, adumbration…the two passages are light-years apart. Lovecraft without his distinctive language, both in his prose and in his verse, would be tedious, flat, and boring. His language—even when he overdoes certain words like eldritch and rugose—simply is his horror.

Much the same goes for my horror poetry. Language is paramount; cross-currents of rhythm and sound pattern highlight key words that by themselves unmistakably indicate genre. Beneath the layers of that language, vampires and werewolves and ‘unutterable things’ may wander, but the verbal texture remains paramount.

My dark poetry is something quite different. These are poems that emerge from within in ways that verses about creatures and monsters—which quite frequently end up comic, as in the limericks in A Verse to Horrors: An Abecedary of Monsters and the Monstrous—never can. Whenever I write about literary horrors, I am constantly aware of myself as vates, as maker, as creator of things that do not exist but that I wish to bring momentarily into animation. The act is, if you will, artificial in the extreme.

My dark poetry, however, is organic, uninhibited, frequently unanticipated. Perhaps the best example are the verses that compose The Warren Poems (in Matrix—Echoes of Growing Up West, 2010). They were originally composed twenty years ago during the year or so following my father’s death and incorporated into a small-press edition of verses, Matrix—Poems, in 1995.

To this day, I consider them among the most ‘horrific’ things I’ve written, not because they flaunt vampires and demons and zombies, but because now, from the perspective of two decades, I cannot conceive of the person who wrote them.

At the time, although I did not know it then and would not know it for another half decade, I was undergoing a severe depressive episode that coincided with my father’s death. Our house was literally falling apart around us; the rear wall had separated from the foundation by a good four inches along the entire back, and we could see daylight between the wall and the ceiling in our bedroom. I was diagnosed with marginal diabetes, but I had seen the toll the disease had taken on my father and was perhaps overly concerned with my own health. I was progressively getting deafer, although the time when I would need double hearing aids was still in the future. I could barely stand to be in the same room with my family because I either could not understand what they were saying or they had to yell at me to get my attention…which made my anger worse. And for two or three years, I had become increasingly aware of ringing, jangling, hissing, booming, and assorted other internal sounds.

During that time, I was convinced that I was going crazy. When I asked a doctor what I could do about…well, about everything but especially about the noises, he responded blandly, “Tinnitus. Live with it.”

Then my father died.

When I started on The Warren Poems, it was as therapy, although I would not have put it quite that way. I simply had to write them. The process was simple. I took a key moment in my life, when things seemed particularly difficult or unsettled, transferred that moment to a poor fellow named (intentionally) ‘Warren,’ then proceeded to make his life a living hell. In real life, I was threatened with molestation; in Warren’s life, it happened. The theory was that if Warren could make it through to the end of the poem, I could survive as well.

This went on for nineteen poems; then I wrote the final one: “Warren Says Farewell to His Father’s Ghost.”

And the need for Warren disappeared.

I am grateful to Warren for many things, not the least for actually keeping me sane during a difficult year. But I am also grateful to him for forcing me to look back at my writing—especially my poetry—and realize how essentially dark nearly everything I had written was. I even wrote a Christmas program one year for our church; after she read it, my wife looked at me and said, “You can’t perform this in church!” It was too dark even for her.

Warren also gave me perspective when, a few years after Matrix was published, I was diagnosed with clinical bipolarism extending back as far as my teen years. No one—least of all I—knew about the problem until I was in my forties. That’s a long time to live with darkness, especially under the assumption that everyone else had the same feelings, the same emotions, the same driving needs…but that they were strong enough to bear up under them. The Warren Poems and subsequent ‘mainstream’ pieces became ways of understanding my own darkness by transferring it outside of me, examining it, exploring, exploiting it, and in the process creating (I hope) art.

When I finally began writing about horror—especially my books on Stephen King—and then writing horror itself, the transition was easy. Technically, my horror poetry deals with a more controlled vocabulary, with more precisely determined rhythms and sounds; but essentially there is not that great a difference between it and my non-horror poetry.

Ghosties and ghoulies and long-legged beasties can be fun; battling the darkness is not.

* * * * * * * * * *

…Is Death

Dreams brought me to this catacomb—

Dank necropolis breathing heavy rot

Through sable soil moldering with age.

Dreams unspeakable—drawn from ancient tomes,

Dark whisperings—brought me here. I wait, caught

Between sleep and madness—in this close cage.

All around they rise, creatures of the gloam,

Twisted, tortured, skeletal—they rise from plots

Of creviced marble, fingers crooked with rage.

In dim-light, pale bones gleam like polished chrome,

Ragged cerecloths counterfeit hangman’s knots—

Fell accoutrements aching for a stage.

They shamble, scuff beneath an arcing dome

Of root-clogged earth, haunted by worms and clots

Of new-dead flesh, corruption’s equipage.

I back into a ravaged, crumbled combe,

Hope to hide from their contempt, their quick hot

Gasps of hatred, their murderous rampage.

In dream, this fearful darkness felt like home,

Familiar, comforting—yet now, distraught,

I feel it smothering, black doom’s presage.

Closer—they surge across bedeviled loam—

I shudder, scream— my tears avail me naught—

My cursed dreams gape…I’ve earned their deathly wage—

—In the Void: Poems of Science Fiction, Myth and Fantasy, and Horror (Borgo Press, 2009): 107.

 “Night’s Plutonian Shore”        

“Tell me what thy lordly name is…”

—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven”

Some say the way is Stygian dark,

Cerberic, fraught with harms,

Phlegethonic, its wild flames stark,

Impervious to spoken charms,

Impregnable to arms.

They tell of wells of bleak dismay

Assaulting pilgrims’ souls,

Of horrors waiting to betray,

Demand their fill of terror’s tolls

Like gnarled, vicious trolls.

But worse—the curse of nival ways,

Of palely vapid streams,

Hung low with heavy-frosted bays

Where woad and madder—ghastly gleams—

Choke paths to darker dreams;

Where ash-streams clash with frozen stones;

Where melancholy dwells;

Where time-lost souls proceed with groans

To hidden, nightmare-ridden cells,

To endure prodigious hells.

—In the Void: Poems of Science Fiction, Myth and Fantasy, and Horror (Borgo Press, 2009): 109.

In the House Beyond the Field

Cold beyond white fields it stands,

Empty, lone, outlined

With grey, landscape winter-bland,

Blind façade unlined

By twisted, dead ivy strands.

White-framed, shuttered windows stare

Blankly at bare trees;

All about, a distant air—

Neglect, loose debris

Fluttered in an icy glare.

But inside…inside, where dark

Shadows roam in rooms

Abandoned to waiting, stark

Emptiness, shapes loom—

Unfocused, horror’s birthmarks:

Beneath raw floorboards a heart

Beats judgment, throbs guilt;

Behind a bricked wall, apart,

Aslant, quickly built,

Moans cascade with subtle art;

In one room, undead wails rise

From thick, black, sealed vaults;

In one, cats’ ungodly cries

Screech without a halt;

In one, a raven looms, flies….

In a dead man’s mind, a flask

Of wine spills, parches;

Room to room in solemn Masque

Death softly marches—

Ghosts resume bloodcurdling tasks.

—In the Void: Poems of Science Fiction, Myth and Fantasy, and Horror (Borgo Press, 2009): 110.

The Dweller on the Edge of Day

Between light and dark, in twilit

Afterglow, of neither day

Nor night but shunned by each—

Afraid of night, of sunlight slit

Into portal dreams that prey

On stuttered, sullen speech;

Afraid of day, too numb to pit

Rampant light against the sway

Of midnight’s selfish reach;

But caught, unwilling to submit

To either, lest one betray

My bleakest fears, impeach

This half-life nothingness as fit

For neither breath nor death, flay

Consciousness to screech,

A wail, an agony—commit

Me to damnable decay,

Beyond all healing reach,

Beyond all saving reach.

—In the Void: Poems of Science Fiction, Myth and Fantasy, and Horror (Borgo Press, 2009): 108.

Introduction to:

A Verse to Horrors 

There’s something as darkness approaches,

There’s something Uncanny that broaches

The cask of our reason

If but for a season

And makes us as squirmy as roaches;

It may come all at once, in a flash—

Taut-muscle, and hustle, and brash,

Huge and abhorrent,

It may rush like a torrent,

Fangs glistening and ready to gnash;

Or it may be more subtle and slight,

A flickering trick of the light,

An after-sight sheen

That is scant to be seen

But that haunts us throughout the long night.

It may be disease or disaster—

Our bodies may stiffen like plaster;

Flesh rot off bone,

Beauty come crone,

‘Til we wish death would creep along faster.

Whatever the Thing, though we fear it

We will whistle brave nothings and jeer it—

But deep in our hearts

We feel panic’s darts,

The breaking of sweat as we near it;

And the Horror becomes one with us—

We may pray, we may scream, we may cuss;

But when it is finished

We find we’re diminished

To gross tissue, pooled blood, and raw pus.

— A Verse to Horrors: An Abecedary of Monster and the Monstrous (CreateSpace, 2012).

WARREN—PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A NEUROTIC

Awake at two am, waiting for the leak

he knows will come, must come

(as it has come for three long years

of nuzzling black whammy into cracks

and lifting butt-end shingles to finger

secret recesses for dampness)—

he knows the roof is sound, knows it

with the upper layerings of little grey

cells that constitute his mind—but

in the darker damper places he

knows knows knows that it will come

must come is fated to come and

drip drip drip insidious dampness

into the drywall, into the two-by-fours

that frame the window,

into the four-chambered tissues of his

waiting heart and clog the arteries

of his life

with thick white pasty sludge…

part drywall, part stucco, part

rarified adust of his melancholy fears

—Matrix: Echoes of Growing Up West (Borgo Press, 2010), 163

WARREN EVALUATES THE EFFECTS OF ARIPIPRAZOLE

Words grow hauntingly,

Roll half-tauntingly from the mind

Where once, not long ago,

Image poured and metaphor

Fused meaning with high passion—

And also darkled shadows, fear, and dread.

Instead of rocket highs and

Depth-plumbed lows,

Widely barren plains, unbroken now

By crest or depth, unfurrowed in the

Lassitude of listlessness,

Numbed and dumbed and stilled.

To walk is easier thus.

Each step-by-step level and unruffled.

Horizons no longer loom. Twilights

Linger until the moon herself sleeps settled.

And dawn creeps slowly on until she

Merges unbeknownst with noon.

And thus it is. And is. And is.

And whether that is good,

I do not know.

—Matrix: Echoes of Growing Up West (Borgo Press, 2010), 188.

* * * * * * * *

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. His writing are available here, at starshineandshadows.com, at journalstone.com, and at hellnotes.com.

Good Words/Bad Words

There are no ‘good’ words. There are only words used precisely and accurately in appropriate contexts.

And there are no “bad” words. There are only words used imprecisely and inaccurately in inappropriate contexts.

Words are essentially neutral. They are arbitrary constructs of letters or sounds that by themselves carry no meaning. The easiest way to confirm this is to look at how different languages label specific things: cat, dog, fish, house. No two languages use exactly the same arrangement of letters or sounds to refer to these universal (or at least planetary) concepts. In fact, some languages do not even share the same physical symbols for sounds (for example, Japanese and Chinese ideographs compared with western letters). And most languages contain sounds that are often difficult if not impossible for speakers of other languages to replicate. The slightest movement of the tongue against the teeth, or an infinitesimal shift of the jaw, or a minor drop in pitch in speaking can transform a word and, knowingly or not, force it to refer to something unintended.

Yet in every composition or creative writing class I have taught, at some point someone would ask if it was permitted to use “bad” words. There was no question what the students meant; there are certain of those arbitrary constructs of letters and sounds that our culture has deemed unsuitable for polite discourse. At one point or another in history, however, most of those words were acceptable, at least when spoken. In the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, written by the Father of English Poetry and intended primarily for an aristocratic/noble audience (there were few other audiences at the time for physical books), Chaucer writes:

And shame it is, is a prest take keep,

A shiten shepherde and a clene sheep.

Wel oghte a preese ensample for to yive,

By his clennesse, how that his sheep sholde lyve.

If the Middle-English seems difficult, read the passage out loud, using modern pronunciation and ignoring any problematical final e. There the offending word is, in written verse, and no one appears to have objected at the time.

Similarly, words which societies at one time considered improper now fit perfectly well into conversation and writing. Sweater raised the hackles of Victorians, perhaps because it referred openly to a bodily function; pullover or cardigan were preferred. Bleachers likewise indicated that the speaker/writer was of a lower class.

(Note: I realize that there is one word—the bad word—that has never been acceptable, but I will talk about it later.)

The terms most helpful in determining when most words are “good” or “bad” are denotation and connotation.

Denotation: The first is the most straightforward. It simply means “what the word means.”

Meaning itself is complex. As noted above, words don’t actually mean anything; we assign meanings to certain strings of letters or collations of sounds. There is nothing inherently “doggish” about d-o-g, yet most English speakers and readers know in general what it refers to—a four-legged, hairy mammal that goes bow-wow. In Finnish, of course, it might go vuff; in Japanese, wan-wan, and so on. But in general, we recognize a dog when we see one.

English-speaking societies have tacitly agreed that that particular sets of symbols represent certain things. Through time, such agreements may shift and words take on vastly different meanings. Knight (back when it was usually spelled cniht) initially meant boy or servant; now it refers to a man holding a specific level within a hierarchy of rank, one who usually has servants of his own.

It becomes important, then, to recognize that words can be slippery things. With the internet and its access to world-wide spoken and written languages, words can and do change meanings rapidly…or, perhaps more frustrating, accumulate new meanings, often at odds with the original senses. Cleave, as used in the King James Version of the Bible—“Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh”— means ‘to hold to, to adhere, to be close’; when used in modern parlance, it is more likely to mean ‘to separate, to cut apart, as with a cleaver.’ I might use it in the older sense; you might read it and assign the modern sense to it…and whatever I meant to say is lost in confusion.

To take another example, a more common one. Set comes from an old Germanic root meaning ‘to sit.’ A thousand years or so later, it can mean many more things: a television set, a set of encyclopedias, to set the table, wait for concrete to set, set one’s hair, find that the Jell-O hasn’t set. Same word, entirely different denotations. In fact, in the Oxford English Dictionary, the word has over 140 meanings, none of them repetitions.

So I say set; you hear set—and there’s a good chance we still are not communicating precisely. Here, context becomes crucial. One does not, for example, want the Jell-O to set in exactly the same was as concrete sets.

Connotation: Words not only have lexical, that is dictionary-based, meanings, but they also have a sphere of emotional suggestions attached to them. Few words outside the mostly functional terms in English—is, are, was, were, to, from, and, but, and others—mean only what the dictionary says. For various reasons, whether cultural, regional, or personal, most words echo not only in our brains but in our hearts…and occasionally in our nervous systems. When that happens, we have entered the realm of connotation.

In my classes, I would frequently write the word cellar on the board and ask the students if they responded positively or negatively to it. In almost every case, the result was a 50/50 split, with a handful or so remaining neutral.

When I asked for reasons why the word was positive, I got answers that ranged from “That was where we played as children,” to “There were always secrets and mysteries, old furniture, interesting things to explore,” to “That’s where Grandma kept the ice cream.”

Most of the neutrals admitted that they had never lived in a house with a cellar, so generally they didn’t even think about the word.

The negatives…ah, the negatives spoke to my horror-writer imagination: “dark,” “creepy,” dirt floor covered with some kind of white crusty stuff,” “windowless,” “10-watt light bulb,” “shadowy,” and on and on.

Same word. For one group, shivers of anticipation and warm memories; for another group, shivers of quite another kind.

Many words just don’t fit certain contexts, not because of what the word might mean but because of cultural associations build into them. “The bride was resplendent in her gown of white satin and floor-length lace veil”—acceptable so far, but what if the sentence ends with—“with a lovely bouquet of fragrant lilies in her fist”?

Fist?

Wrong word, even though, if we imagine the situation and see the bride’s hand gripping the bouquet, perhaps her knuckles white from nervousness and tension and anticipation, the word fist may be literally appropriate.

This kind of wobble occurs more frequently than any others in the manuscripts and printed texts I’ve read lately. The almost-the-right word slips in unnoticed by the writer; but the reader notices and experiences a slight start.

Too many startling moments, and the reader might just decide to go elsewhere for entertainment.

For writers of fiction—and especially for writers of horror fiction or dark fiction—connotation may be as important, even more important, than denotation. English has the largest vocabulary of any modern language group. There may be many words that denotatively fit a context; but to create atmosphere, to delineate character, to establish a landscape, there may be only one that works connotatively. Quick example: Why do we say “Pacific Ocean” and not “Pacific Sea,” or “South Seas” and not “South Oceans”? Denotatively the two key words mean ‘large bodies of water’, but they are not precisely interchangeable.

“Good” words, then, are words that have precisely the meaning intended, that are used in a context that will clarify any potential ambiguities, and that are appropriate to the desired audience. One of my favorite words, “Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis,” while devised in 1935 to make a point, is nonetheless a “good” word when used medically or as an example of a long word. If a doctor is addressing a group of miners on the subject of the dangers of their profession, however, it would be a “bad” word—probably no one there except the doctor would know what it means. The appropriate “good” word for that audience would be “black lung.” It means the same thing, but the latter phrase more clearly defines something they might have experienced.

“Bad” words create a bit more difficulty.

In one sense, a “bad” word is any word that is difficult for the audience—whether readers or listeners—to understand within the context. When I was in high school, I discovered the beauties of the thesaurus. I wrote an essay for English, looking up six common words and replacing them with “better” words—that is, with longer, Latinate, complex terms. I didn’t know Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis at the time, or I might have been tempted to slide it in.

When the teacher returned the paper, it had eight marks on it. One was the grade in the upper right-hand corner. Numbers two through six were red circles around every fancy word I had used. And number seven was a curt note: “Burn your thesaurus!”

I’ve since learned that a thesaurus can be a helpful tool, if a treacherous crutch. But I also learned my lesson: Don’t use a long word unless it is a “good” word—fitting to the meaning intended, the context, and the audience. I’m sure the teacher understood the words, but they just did not fit into a high-school freshman essay.

Even what we traditionally consider “bad” words may function as “good” words.

C.S. Lewis’s children’s fantasy The Magician’s Nephew (1955) is thematically and chronologically the first of the Chronicles of Narnia, even though it was the sixth written of seven. Just about in the middle of the book, one of the characters, Uncle Andrew, is rather roughly treated by some of the newly created animals of Narnia. When he has reached his limit, he says, “Damn!” Not much in the way of swearing for contemporary readers but a shocker to find in a children’s book in the mid-1950s. More than that, it is the first occurrence of any such language, or thinking, in the nascent Narnia, and signals the more serious fall to come with the eventual arrival of the White Witch. It distorts the perfection of Narnia, it jars with the courtliness of speech that has been developing, it resonates uncomfortably through the remaining volumes, and it demonstrates that Lewis knew precisely when and how to use a “good” “bad” word.

Another example: As a junior in college, I heard one of my professors talking about “bad” words. His father, he said, was a rough-and-tumble man, rugged, largely unlearned, who apparently did not fully understand what made his rather short, bookish son tick. Just before my professor went off to college (the first, I believe, in his family to do so), he spent the summer working with his father…quite literally digging ditches.

On the afternoon of the last day before he was to leave for school, he and his father were sitting on the edge of a trench they had just finished. His father sat quietly for a while, then reached down, squeezed his son’s knee, and said, “Ya did a good job, ya little bastard.”

My professor said that those words struck him straight to the heart. He recognized at once that that was the only way his father had of saying “I love you.” He had used the language and the structures appropriate to his life, to his education, to his outlook. He could not have said it any other way.

I strongly suspect, given the time that has passed since first hearing that anecdote, that his father probably said something stronger than bastard, something that would have been wholly out of place in a sedate English classroom in a small, religiously-based liberal-arts college in the late 1960s. But even as stated, the story made its point. In that context, to that audience, coming from that speaker, bastard was a “good” word. It communicated precisely what the speaker intended.

Which leads us to…the word. The only English word that has never been socially acceptable, that for centuries was prohibited in writing, and that until the mid-1900s rarely if ever appeared.

Some years ago, while teaching Freshman Composition at UCLA, I asked the students to write an essay tracking how a word had changed meanings over time. I left the choice largely up to them (after excluding words like reality and meaning—I couldn’t face the probable redundancies), including obscenities and vulgarisms as options.

A few days later, on young woman in the class stayed after to tell me something that had happened. She was typing her draft at home (this was long before computers and laptops became popular) when her father walked by. He glanced at the paper in the typewriter, took another step or two, did a classic double-take, and stormed back.

“What…!”

“Don’t worry, Daddy,” she said, pointing to the word fuck at the top of the page. “I’m just talking about it. I’m not saying it.”

Half a dozen others chose the same word; largely because of the onus the word has developed when written, those papers were among the stiffest, most awkward, least confident essays I ever received, even though I remain convinced that more than a few of those students actually spoke the word regularly. They just couldn’t write it.

More than thirty years have passed since then, and the word has suffered a sea-change. Where before using it assured the text of a certain shock value, a kind of verbal intimidation, and the writer of equally certain notoriety, in contemporary prose very nearly the opposite happens.

The more often the word appears, the less shocking it is.

I have used it. Three times in The House Beyond the Hill, with one of those occurrences on the first page. The speaker was not someone who would hit his thumb with a hammer and yell, “Oh golly-gee, shucky-darn!” I wanted his language to characterize him immediately, and I think it worked.

In The Slab, which is considerably longer and far more violent, one character says it once. The whole point of the word is to demonstrate graphically that his essential nature had altered from being in the house. That word defines how radically.

In reading contemporary horror—and particularly unpublished manuscripts—I am disturbed by how frequently writers simply let fly. Every sentence, sometimes every other word…and after the first few pages of that, the mind becomes numb. Instead of shocking and intimidating, instead of even offending, the word, subject to such overuse, does something infinitely worse.

It bores.

It degenerates to a meaningless placeholder.

It becomes a cliché.

And, as with most clichés, readers simply tune it out. When that happens, it becomes truly a “bad” word.

So—“good”? or “bad”? As with so many things, the decision is left up to the writer, the final arbiter of whether or not a word is precise, accurate, and appropriate—that is, does it communicate a specific meaning clearly, unambiguously, and suitably to the intended audience. And as for that small class of “no-no” words that often cause so much furor…the lighter the tread, the better.

* * * * * * * *

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. His writing are available here, at starshineandshadows.com, at journalstone.com, and at hellnotes.com.

Meetings with the Masters--C.C.Wilson's HELLFIRE AND DAMNATION II and K.T.Jones's THE SINNER

Connie Corcoran Wilson. Hellfire and Damnation II. Intro. by Jason V. Brock. The Merry Blacksmith Press, 2012, 162 pp. $10.95, trade paperback. ISBN-10: 0615677819; ISBN-13: 978-0615677811

K. Trap Jones. The Sinner. Blood Bound Books, 2012, 306 pp. $11.99, trade paperback. ISBN-10: 0984978216; ISBN-13: 978-0984978212

Connie Corcoran Wilson’s second volume of short fiction,  Hellfire and Damnation II, like her previous collection, draws its inspiration from one of the seminal works of Western Literature, Dante’s Inferno. Jason V. Brock’s perceptive introduction properly identified it as a key influence in the formation of the Italian language, and from that, as a significant influence on the development of European vernaculars, not the least of which is English. In perhaps more ways than can be counted, Dante’s authority as an author—not a redundancy but the foundation of his reputation during the Middle Ages and early Renaissance as a source of Truth, a guide upon whom to model subsequent works—helped to create the circumstances from which the modern world has emerged.

Wilson knows this well. In her own way, she pays tribute to the Master—il Poeta—as generations of writers, scholars, philosophers, and thinkers have done for nearly eight hundred years. Rather than attempting to do this by writing a pastiche of Dante, she has done it, more reasonably, by allowing her stories to grow out of his narrative.

Reaching down into the various levels of Dante’s Hell, she has ferreted out vices and sins, corruptions and depravities, wickednesses and perversions and drawn them from the Underworld into our own, to serve as foundations for tales of greed and gluttony, murder and mayhem, betrayal, contempt, insolence, and a dozen other human inclinations.

Not all of the tales show a direct, allusive connection to Dante, but all of them do suggest an interest in the darkness, the violence, the tragedies and graphic horrors that characterize his foray into Hell. The fact that many of the deaths in Hellfire and Damnation II occur offstage, as it were, does not in the least damped their impact.

My favorites among the eleven tales are the ghost stories: “Cold Corpse Carnival,” “Tempus Fugit, Resurrection Cemetery,” “The Champagne Chandelier.” Wilson handles them with gentleness, at times with an obvious affection for the dead/undead. The result is a sense of creepiness tinged with warmth, an evocation of the eerie as well as a rapport.

At almost the same time that I received Hellfire & Damnation II, I received a copy of K. Trap Jones’ The Sinner. With Wilson’s collection, this novel in verse shares an illustrious history, tapping not into the stream of Dante and his influence but into the later, less disciplined, more popular current of Medieval Dream Visions.

William Langland’s The Vision of Piers Plowman begins:

In a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne,

I shoop me into shroudes as I a sheep were,

In habite as an heremite unholy of werkes,

Wente wide in this world wondres to here.

Ac on a May morwenynge on Malverne hilles

Me bifel a ferly, of Fairye me thoghte.

I was wery forwandred and wente me to reste

Under a brood bank by a bourne syde;

And as I lay and lenede and loked on the watres,

I slombred into a slepyng, it sweyed so murye.

Thanne gan I meten a merveillous swevene--

That I was in a wildernesse, wiste I nevere where.

Briefly paraphrased, Langland’s narrator wanders out one summer and, tired from walking, rested by a stream, where he dreamed a wonderful dream…. In the process of dreaming, relayed in lines of four-stress, alliterative verse, he encounters important social, religious, and political allegorical figures, including incarnations of the Seven Deadly Sins.

This is the point at which Jones’s modern narrative of an encounter with evil begins. His character—the unnamed narrator (unnamed until the end, that is) awakens each morning to find himself in a cave, where he encounters the Seven Deadly Sins. He remembers each only long enough to transcribe it by quill pen onto parchment. Jones’s story begins in winter; his poet wakens from sleep rather than entering a dream—but the ancestry of The Sinner seems clear.

As seems appropriate for his novel-in-verse, Jones does not re-create an archaic form, such as the long-defunct Anglo-Saxon alliterative line. He does not even more forward in literary history to borrow that long-staple of narrative poetry, blank verse, as practiced by Milton, for example, in Paradise Lost. Instead he chooses for his vehicle the long, loose free-verse lines of many contemporary poets as being best suited to meet the needs of both poetry and narrative.

My own choice would have been something more form-oriented, more illustrative of the cadences and rhythms of traditional verses; but then, I have written a 6,500 neo-Miltonic epic in blank verse (which has been read by, oh, tens of people) so I might be prejudiced.

What Jones offers are relatively short stanzas, hanging (literally, in one considers the hanging indent) from a slightly longer introductory line. Within stanzas, line breaks seem more the product of breath-units and sentence structure than pre-established meters and rhythms. The result is at times languid, at times a diffuse stream-of-consciousness that carries the reader through the words toward the narrator’s goals.

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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. His writing are available here, at starshineandshadows.com, at journalstone.com, and at hellnotes.com.