Boo!

Shadows of a thousand years rise again unseen,
Voices whisper in the trees, "Tonight is Halloween!"
...Dexter Kozen

I have a confession to make--I'm a horror gal. Since the day I discovered a pile of pulp mags under a bed in my grandparents' house, I've been a shameless devotee of ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night. But I'm most fond of monsters, which is why I love Halloween.

As a kid I always felt a rush of excitement when the Halloween decorations appeared in stores. That's changed a bit, especially now that the skeletons and costumes show up around the Fourth of July. And each year the trick-or-treaters are fewer in number and most Halloween parties for kids are most likely to be called the "Harvest Festival" or "Corn Maze Party." Somehow the adults have claimed the night for themselves and stripped it of any real fun for the kids. But I don't them ruin my fun.

October 31 is All Hallows Eve,the night when the monster hiding under the bed comes out to play. 

A ghoul friend of mine once told me that life's no fun without a good scare. In the spirit of Halloween,  I offer three creepy tales involving a few of my favorite monsters.

Vampire

Perhaps the preeminent creature of the night is the vampire, the ultimate seducer who offers eternal life, with a catch. Like most people, I first encountered vampires in the movies. However, Bela Lugosi's Dracula never did much for me--he looked too much like a waiter. 

"Today's special is pan seared Chilean Bass
in a balsamic reduction..."

But Christopher Lee's hissing count scared the heck out of me. I watched most of Horror of Dracula with my hands partially covering my eyes, afraid to look, but unable to turn away.

But it was only when I read Bram Stoker's Dracula that I felt the cold hand of fear. There was always a sexual component to Dracula, who both attracts and repels. I imagine this passage was pretty strong stuff to Stoker's Victorian readers: 

There was a deliberate voluptuousness that was both thrilling and repulsive. As she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal til I could see in the moonlight the moisture that lapped the white, sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited.

The vampire offers sex, but it is  debased and bestial, cut off from the human. And I think Stoker touches on the primal fear that animates much of horror--the fear of losing one's humanity. Nowadays vampires have morphed from bloodsucking monsters into someone's prom date! For years I  despaired of seeing a pair of fangs I could relate to, until I found Enter, Night by Michael Rowe.

It's a briskly told tale of ancient, toothy horrors, with an ending that is both heartbreaking and transcendent. If you're hungry for a really good vampire story, this one's for you.

Zombie

Zombie flash mob in London

Zombies are all the rage these days. Did you know there's even a subgenre of literature called zombie lit. Popularity aside, I don't find anything particularly frightening about these plodding creatures. To me they're just one-trick ponies on the lookout for fresh brains. Give me an old-school zombie any day, one created by a Voudou  priestess on a moonlit night.

Which brings me to one of the most frightening short stories I've even read: Pigeons from Hell by Robert E. Parker. The story's set in a deserted plantation haunted by ghostly pigeons, and something else. Stephen Kings calls "Pigeons from Hell" to be "one of the finest horror stories of our century". As usual in matters of horror, King is right.

Ghost

Can they feel, I wonder, those white
silent people we call the dead?
                        ...Oscar Wilde

Ancient and enduring, the  first ghost appeared at some primeval campfire  when one of our ancestors told the first ghost story. More than other monsters, the ghost is a sturdy literary device and pops up in all sorts of fiction, from Shakespeare to Dickens to David Mitchell. But a Halloween ghost always means mischief  and there is no more malicious spirit than The Woman in Black.

Susan Hill's novel is the source for the excellent film of the same name. The narrative's framed as a Christmas Eve ghost story, much as Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. Like James, Hill conjures an atmosphere of escalating dread and isolation. The horror rises to a shattering and unexpected conclusion. 

Psychologists like to theorize why people like me love horror. In his theory of archetypes,  Carl Jung believed that all humans inherited a set of primordial images that are contained in the collective unconscious, and that horror evokes these archetypes. Maybe, but I read ghost stories and watch horror films because I like them. 

So tonight, after the last trick-or-treater has come and gone, I'll pour a glass of blood-red wine and read one of the old tales, one guaranteed to send a shiver down my spine. 

Happy Halloween!

Prejudice and the vampire

I hate prejudice. Sometimes it’s mild, as in “I hate horror films.” Sometimes it’s harmful and frightening, as in the Ku Klux Klan or the way women were pigeonholed as breeders and stupid for so long. It’s often characterised by either “always” or “never,” as in "Those people never do that," or "those people always do that." It’s usually an unthinking remark that, when you think about it, means nothing, but it can become a rallying call. Various objects of hate have existed, and some of the worst consist of ethnic groups. I really hate those.

I wanted to write about it, but I didn’t want to be judgmental or preachy. That kind of work doesn’t do it for me, so why should it for anyone else?

So I thought, “What if I used a race that doesn’t exist? You know, like vampires or shape-shifters, or people with a special psychic gift?”

And so my first paranormal series, the Department 57 series, was born.

Of course it morphed into much more than that. Secret agents fighting against twin enemies—the PHR, an organisation that sees vampires, shape-shifters, or anyone they consider “different” to be genetic malformations, and band together to murder them. And an equally secret, but more loose arrangement of scientists and wealthy people who want to exploit Talents for their own ends. They want longer life, strength and beauty, but they want to steal it, by experimenting on captured Talents to “extract” what they want.

There is also another way for Talents to elude this, but that’s for another series!

That was the core. In the Department 57 series, the Talents are living secretly in society. Nobody knows they exist outside myth. Except the PHR and the experimenters. It was a heady premise and so far it’s taken me through several more series—STORM, Pure Wildfire and now a new series which will make its debut later this year.

Department 57 was the first, however, and at twelve books, I’m resting it. There are still many characters who need writing about, so the word “rest” means just that. I’m not killing the series, it hasn’t finished, I’m just working on new outlines and stories. But I can’t do everything, and I’ve always had more ideas than time to develop them. I have a vampire police procedural series in development and I’ve written the first book of a new series featuring some of my favourite things, history and paranormal romance.

As well as the new series, which is currently called “The Thorndykes.”

So how vulnerable are my Talents? Because they had to invent kryptonite for Superman, he was just too invulnerable without it. I set out to answer questions like, “if they’re so strong and long-living, why haven’t they taken over the world?” and “what makes ordinary humans special?”

Building the world was a challenge, but it has taken a lot of testing and it still works, so I’m proud of what I’ve achieved. Now I’m taking a version of the world back in time for Samhain (see what I mean about new series?) so I’m mixing up that aspect, as well, and including some of my favourite myths.

So, romantic suspense. The stories in the Department 57 and STORM series are secret agents tales. The difference is that in Department 57, they’re living secretly, and in STORM they’re “out,” facing a bunch of new problems, learning to live together. I’ve read stories that have paranormal beings living in society, set in a future or alternate world, but I wanted to know how it would happen now, how it would affect society as we see it today. And to take it at the cusp, when Talents have only just revealed themselves. All they want is to live in parallel with everyone else, but there are much fewer of them, and they have the might of politics and prejudice to face. There are so many legends about them, you could choose to believe what you wanted, or believe what someone else told you instead of the evidence in front of your own eyes.

Would you like a vampire living next door?