Half-Adult

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

On the day I started rereading The Ocean at the End of the Lane something stung me beneath my right eye.

I didn't notice the stinging itself, but I did notice that my eye was itchy and puffy afterwards, and, going to look into the mirror, I saw that it was red and swollen. 

 

I was disturbed by the reflection looking back at me if only because it offered a glimpse of what my face might look like if I were old. It was as if I had suddenly become half aged. The skin beneath my one eye grew heavy and red, folding over itself like swelling wrinkles. 

I shuddered, for I knew that it was in a similar fashion that the fiend that calls itself Ursula Monkton enters the story, burrowing its way into the protagonist's foot in the form of a grey worm. The ancient and strangely powerful Hemstock's refer to its kind as a flea. I thought it a fitting picture and I in turn wondered what it was that had bitten me. 

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is an amalgam of a book; only half aged; one half adult, the other a child. Indeed, it defies every attempt to force it into an age. Neil Gaiman, the book's own author, is still not certain whether it is a book for adults or for children. 

The book's child protagonist, a boy of 7, certainly makes it seem a book for young people. At first glance, at least. But, as Gaiman himself put it, if it were to be a book for children he might have had to remove the scene in which the boy's father, in a fit of unexplained madness, tries to drown him in the bath.  

 

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is questionable, to say the least. It is the only dark book featuring a young protagonist I have ever felt necessary to withhold from too a young a reader. Sometimes it is inappropriate; and yet, I think it is best to read it as if you were still a child. Indeed, someone too adult might try too hard to understand it. This would be a mistake, for in doing so it is likely that they will not understand it at all.

I have written before about the adult horrors in books meant for children. They are, as I point out in my post titled The Adult Shadows in the The Sisters Grimm, made more horrific because they are placed in contrast to a child's world inside a child's book, and so, they become all the more terrible because they are not supposed to be understood in the least. 

They are rendered the stuff of horror not because the adult world is necessarily horrifying, but because there is something frightful in it when seen from the perspective of a child.

 

But this is, of course, not only true in fiction. Few of us like to think about it, but the adult world once seemed just as alien and arcane to us as the dark powers inside this book do to me now.

 

 

There are moment's throughout every child's life when they realize, with a thought that feels a lot like a shudder, how little control they have over their own world. I grew up in a safe home, and my parent's tried to shelter me from the outside world like any loving parents do, giving the hard truths to me slowly and in good time at the appropriate age. They kept a close eye on the movies I watched and sometimes on the books I read, telling me just enough so that I would know what types of things to stay far away from.

Still, sometimes it scared me to know how little I knew; that life crippling mistakes could be made completely by accident, by the ignorance of trusting a stranger too well, or in messing with something dark disguised as just risky enough to be exciting. 

There remains ever on the edge of the child's life the possibility that things could fall out of control, and they, being small and mostly helpless, could do nothing about it. The idea that a child could somehow ruin their own life by not being adult enough, not knowing enough, or simply not knowing any better, makes me gulp. 

There were earlier glimpses in my own childhood before the time my parent's took a book I was reading away, telling me there were devilish themes inside of it. 

 

I was taught to be paranoid of strangers from a young age. I still have bad dreams about being taken by an unknown person sometimes, and although these dreams are nightmarish, they still do not compare with the real shuddering fear I felt when I was young and unable to judge what was dangerous and what not; such as the time an old man pulled over to talk to me when I was playing in my driveway, and I, forgetting everything I had been taught about being wary of strangers in a moment, stepped closer only to hear my dad shout my name in an alarming tone. 

 

I felt foolish afterwards and insecure, and even though he turned out to be a kind man (my dad spoke to him after I had left) I knew afterwards that there were risks out there I had no idea about. It was scary thinking that the things I read and the people I talked to could turn on me or do me ill. Worse still was the thought that I could not see it coming and so would be helpless in preventing it from happening.

 

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is, as I've said, half-adult. This is represented to me in the way the cover has folded over, as if someone (probably my little brother who borrowed it once and returned it in this condition) has only half looked at it, not daring to open the book all the way.

It is, after all, a book that is only ever half read; whether through the eyes of a child who does not recognize some of the adult things going on behind the windows, or an adult recalling what it felt like to be a child and have no control when their world changes, the book is designed not to be understood, or rather, to be only half understood. 

So, when the boy's father tries to drown him in the bath, we have no idea why. We know that he is not a violent man. Indeed, the story makes a point of telling us the boy's father has never once hit him. Still, any one that has ever had a short-tempered parent knows how scary it is to stand in their shadow, even if they do not touch you or hurt you, the angry look in their eye is enough to cause some level of fear. Thus, we do not need to understand why the father is harming the boy. Indeed, that is what makes it feel so scary and so very real. No child ever really knows why they are being harmed or why their parent and guardian has suddenly turned on them.

 

Having been a child once, everyone should know the fear of not being understood and of not understanding. With our limited language and perception, how can we explain when a teacher was cruel to us? When we do not really know what happened, much less how to explain; all we can really know is that something felt wrong about it. It is almost as if it is too adult for a child to talk about. They can not explain why an adult does what they do, neither can they always know exactly what was wrong about it. Children, while having a great sense for wrongness and injustice, are less than inept at explaining how they feel and why.

Furthermore, how can a child  know that, when an old man pulls over to talk to them that he might have ill intentions? How can a child even imagine what he might really be thinking? 

In The Ocean at the End of the Lane Ursula Monkton knows this, and she exploits this, turning the boy's parent's against him, making up lies about him, telling him that he will not be believed because he is a child and she is an adult. 

 

We do not know what Ursula Monkton really is, but she appears in the form of a grown-up, and the book makes this something truly horrible, telling us that "she was power incarnate.. She was the storm... she was the adult world with all its powers and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty." 

By the end of the story, the boy, now himself grown, has forgotten about the horrible events of his childhood. He does not remember Ursula Monkton. He no longer knows that his father once tried to drown him. 

This is necessary. It is necessary because, if we, like him, remembered for a second what it was like not to understand a world of change and unseen danger and out of control strangers, well, then we'd realize for ourselves what Lettie Hemstock, the eternal eleven year old of this story, said so well 

"The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world." 

 

If we remembered what it was like to be so and to know oneself to be so we'd realize with horror that not much has changed now that we are older. The truth is, we are all just children who aren't young anymore, and so we are half. Half-child, half-adult, only ever half understanding, only ever half-understood; and, being so, there is still and ever the lingering possibility that our world could cut loose from our control.

 

In which case this hybrid of a book, itself something compound and cross-stitched, can only be for us half-beings. 

The Grisly Giants Beneath the Earth

I recently read Roald Dahl's The BFG.  I was surprised by how lighthearted the tale was in comparison to other popular Dahl works.

The giants, though flesh eating and barbarically hideous, were not really enough to offer much fright to my imagination. Not even the more childish bits of my mind were spooked by the idea. The image of large hands groping in through my bedroom window and stuffing me head first into a large gaping mouth was not enough to writhe the dark parts of my fancy. 

 

I lay in bed the night I first began reading the book and I watched the branches of the tree outside my window as they bobbed closer and further, closer and further, and I thought to myself that, in the dark, it looked very much like a grapnel hand groping in the night, waiting for me to look away so it could break its mundane pattern and reach out to grab me.

 

I thought the hand was friendly enough though, and, if I'd have to imagine the giant at the other end of it, I'd say it was more than likely the fingers of the Big Friendly Giant I was looking at. 

The snow rested on its knuckles and wrists as if it had been standing there a good long while, waving at me to notice it so it would have no choice but to take me away and be my friend. 

It made the hand look old, pale, and wrinkled, and somehow lonely. 

 

It was enough to tickle my fancy, I admit, but I slept fine that night. I did not dream of giants and large hungry hands. I had no nightmares about a short lived life ended with one final speculation as one slides helplessly down a giant's dark throat. 

But then Roald Dahl did something else, something strange and I dare say frightening. He stuffed the giants beneath the earth, not as a tool of horror, but as a way to get rid of them. 

Now that, I thought, that was a way to scare me, to put my imagination out in the dark and let it go wild imagining the outcomes of such a story. 

As I fell asleep that second night having completed the book and thus having left those nine hungry giants in their deep dug pit, I could not help but think about how gloriously frightful that image was. 

 

I don't know why the giants once imprisoned were so much more frightful to me than when they lurked free in the streets, leaning on rooftops and looking into windows for children to devour. Maybe deep dark pits are simply easier to imagine than humongous humanoid hands grabbing me. 

Maybe everyone that was once a child knows the fear of deep dark spaces, basements and closets and such, and abysmal nightmares about falling into such pitch black holes.

I was reminded of a painting by Francisco Goya entitled Saturn Devouring His Son, a painting that would have been enough to frighten me as a child. 

That image is exactly what I imagined it would look like, I thought to myself, picturing an ignorant soul going on a walk late at night with a flash light only to come across a deep pit, too dark to see down. 

Some horrid sound would come out of it, like someone ravenously enjoying their dinner, and they, not knowing any better, would shine their beam of light into the pit. 

Look up the painting and maybe you will understand the deep bedded terror of this image, if you do not already.

Why did Dahl think that putting the giants beneath the earth would solve the problem, I wonder? 

Story-wise it does, at least. It actually gets rid of them quite neatly, with very little trouble along the way as the nine beastly creatures are deposited into their prison. 

He puts the giants out of sight and out of mind, or at least, he pretends to. 

 

Really though, Dahl embeds them effortlessly into the child's mind. Likely they will not mind them there, not until they ask the question of what happens after. 

Do the giants ever get out? What if there is an earth quake? Or, worse, what if someone falls in?

Thus, narratively Dahl creates a horror. Few things are more frightful than stories that let us do the imagining. Books can be sealed up once finished. But hooks like these, they linger in one's head, reshaping into frightful scenarios.

 

I wonder if Dahl intended it? Was a deep pit really the best thing he could think of when trying to tuck the giants away? Or did he mean for us to imagine the echoes of their hungry howls on quiet windless nights?

I wouldn't put it past him. 

 

How far is this pit from civilization? The book doesn't tell us. But it must be close enough, surely. After all, we are told about the so called single disaster to come out of it: the time three silly drunk men fell in and all that was hence heard of them was the crunching of their bones and the giants below as they howled in delight. 

I gulp to think that there are nine hungry giants in that pit and only three silly men to feed them. 

I wonder if Dahl considered that too. It would not surprise me.

The story tells us that a sign is put up after that, a sign reading "it is forbidden to feed the giants"; a fine way to make light of the situation; enough to make any child laugh at the idea of flesh eating giants tucked away beneath the earth, right?

Until you think twice about it, then it makes one shiver. 

I myself imagine that gaping black pit is itself like an open mouth leading directly to the colossal stomach of the hollowed out earth. I imagine at times you can hear nine enormous stomachs gurgle and growl and the giants as they wail out in horrid sounds of despair. 

It is no easier to think that the pit closed over eventually. In fact, it is almost worse. Crammed into their tightly collapsed holes, the giants would become utterly deformed; crooked from bowing; sightless from the lasting dark; left only with their tactual hands, always fingering and groping to see what's around them. The giants would mutter into the silence as the walls of the earth near in on them. Every so often the earth would tremor above as they shift, sleeping in its bowels. 

Soon, the people would forget there ever was such a thing as giants. 

And so, the grisly giants would sit, hunched forever beneath the earth, ingesting dirt and sucking the worms and centipedes out of the soil; always there, but never any less hungry. 

 

Dracula: The Diaries that Were Never Meant to be Read

(or) The Writing Puppeteer and the Surrogate Confessor

 

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Bram Stoker's Dracula were written almost a lifetime apart. Yet the two novels are undeniably the most highly read books of horror ever to be written. 

 

This, to me, is no mystery.

 

Indeed, when one thinks of other renowned writers of horror, such as Edgar Allan Poe or H.P. Lovecraft, one usually thinks first of the author who penned them, not the names of their stories. It is not so for Shelley's Frankenstein and Stoker's Dracula. They are remembered mainly for their monsters, for the titles of their monstrous works, for the horrors that they penned within. 

Frankenstein's monster (widely and ironically called merely "Frankenstein") is a sapient creature created from dissevered human parts. Dracula, the most well known vampire ever written about, is an apparition of terror who feasts and sucks on other human beings. 

 

I trust I did not have to tell you that. You already knew who they were. Everyone does, after all. But it is good to be reminded just how ghastly these creatures with whom we are so well acquainted are.

 

While there is no denying that the grotesque and debase way human life is sucked, smothered, split, and severed in these works is utterly unsettling, there is another more horrifying detail. 

It is easy to be sickened by Victor Frankenstein's cowardice and self victimization. Even more so is it natural to detest and dread Dracula who diminishes naive young maidens to ghostliness and drives people into madness and terror. 

But, to do all this while also making the reader feel uneasy, not just with the plot itself, but with themselves, that is a narrative feat to be admired, even to be feared. 

Indeed, it is no coincidence that the two most engrossing tales of horror ever to be written adopt the same narrative style. These works are not tales, they are private confessions; they are the dreadful diaries of those who have gone to dark and dismal places and seen the diabolical; and, what's more, they were never meant to be read. 

 

 

This is, of course, not to say that the authors did not mean for us to read them. But the author is not the real teller of these stories, not in the fictional sense of the word. They are the executioner, the puppet master, and they have their ink stained hands inside another's mouth. 

 

Stoker is the singular master of numerous private diaries, confidential letters, and secret interviews. From Jonathan Harker, Madam Mina, Lucy Westerna, Doctor Seward and more, in Dracula, Stoker puppeteers these soul's private musing and secret confessions. He plays these puppets so perfectly, searing and tearing at them with his pen till the ink dots his pages, till the reader themselves can pretend in full that there is no author at all, just horrid utterances written by cursed characters who know not that their words are being read by a stranger.  

Shelley likewise has her own skill as a puppeteer, speaking in not one, but two mouths at the same time in a story told within another. In Frankenstein, Captain Walton concedes the account told to him by Victor Frankenstein on a near desecrated ship, trapped inside a frozen sea. 

One might say Walton had little choice but to listen to Victor Frankenstein's horrible account. He had no where else to go. He is locked by cold and ice just as he is by his human conviction, stuck in the clutches of curiosity and foremost, by a moral contract to listen to this distraught stranger's confession. 

Yet, the reader, having all the places to go in the world, finds themselves trapped in the same fate. From the stories first pages we are led on by the deplorable thread, the demoralizing idea that the teller has no one else to turn to. As we read the reiteration of Frankenstein's words through the mark of Walton's pen, we are implored to listen by the same means he is. We keep reading because we are curious; because our mind has been meddled with; for the narrator has claimed that there is horrible confession on its way, just ahead, on any one of these pages, and deep down, we would like to hear it to sate our secret curiosity. 

Thus, the reader is entreated to listen for the sake of the teller's soul in both tales. In Dracula as well as Frankenstein, we are not sure if the teller will make it out alive, and thus the horrible thought lurks always in the back of our mind that no one else will ever know that they are dead, or what it was that killed them.

 

 

 

 It becomes easy to see why the names of the author's, though remembered, become somehow detached from their works. The authors are admired once the book is finished, recognized when their names are spoken or their works are discussed. Yet, while the book is being read, the author becomes altogether irrelevant, displaced for the sake of terror and dismay. It is, after all, so much more terrible and thrilling to become enthralled and engrossed with the confession. 

Let us not ask the writer what their intentions are. Let us fear the monster instead. Let us forget that their is a writer pulling strings and attempting to shock. Let us be at their mercy. 

 

Of course, if we are to continue with this fictional pretense for the sake of good horror, it is also important to note that the confessor will never know that someone has read their words. It is a strange and unsettling thing to read the diaries of those now dead.

The tale of Victor Frankenstein, if we are to consider it further, is one confession inside of another. For as already stated, Victor Frankenstein tells his story to one more soul before he dies. It is captain Robert Walton, his first confessor, who writes down every word uttered by Victor Frankenstein on that cold barren sea.

I will not recount here the horrible things confessed by Frankenstein, only say that it is little wonder the tale haunts Walton so much so that he cannot but write it down, thus sharing the harrowing burden with the page and the reader's inquisitive eyes. 

Though naturally these words were never meant for us. Walton writes to his sister Margaret. It is to her that he confesses.

"What can I say that will enable you to understand the depth of my sorrow?" he asks. "All that I should express would be inadequate and feeble."

Yet there is no guarantee that Walton's words are ever read. No known response is ever received from Margaret, not a word is ever uttered by this surrogate confessor. Furthermore, the reader can never know if Walton ever reaches land and finds another soul to share in his burden. 

It may very well be that Victor's secret dies on that desolate sea, in which case the reader is the only one that knows.

Thus, Walton's story ends with the form of Frankenstein's monster disappearing across the ice into the distant darkness.

 

Famously, the story of Dracula starts with the diaries of Jonathan Harker in the weeks he spends at the castle of Count Dracula. It was in those weeks that his diary proved to be a source of solace; a soothing to his sanity in satanic places. He never imagined how vital this comfort would turn out to be. Indeed, he sometimes shudders to imagine that his words might be read by another.

Thus, when Jonathan confesses that he hesitates to note down the terrible things he saw because he fears that his love Mina might one day read it, what reader does not pause, if only for an instant, and wonder who gave them the right to read these private words.

It is a strange sort of sensation that feels faintly of discomfort, even disgust. 

 

It is true that a great many diaries are shared throughout the course of the narrative. It often seems that for the characters words do not suffice. In the rare occasion that horrors are repeated aloud they usually cause great distress. 

The reading and sharing of private writings throughout acts as a symbol of good faith, and what's more, as a more perfect truth. The accounts as they are thus laid out on the pages of their diaries are unaltered by doubt or misconceptions caused by reflections or reason. They are the raw reports of the senses and what came over them, sometimes written mere moments after the events transpire.

But there is another reason that the characters rely so on their diaries. It is a truth that every writer knows. It is simply this: a soul is easier shared on the page than in conversation. As Mina herself says, to write is both a listening and a whispering to oneself, and so, the soul is not disguised by such trifles as one's voice or actions. It is unaltered by the reactions of those they are speaking to. 

This is not to say that the characters are immune to the discomforts caused by such intrusions. Madam Mina, who becomes the guardian of their diaries as well as her own, says after reading one such account:

"I have been more touched than I can say by your grief...It told me, in its very tones, the anguish of your heart. It was like a soul crying out to almighty God. No one else must ever hear them spoken ever again!... none other need now hear your heart beat as I did."

Van Helsing upon requesting permission to read the diary of one recently deceased shares a similar statement, though his speaks even more directly into the reader's own ear. 

 

Upon assuring that he does not desire to read the papers for curiosities sake, he says, 

 

"I have them (the papers) all here. I took them... so that no strange hand might touch them – no strange eyes look through her words and into her soul."

 

If there is one thing to be taken from this it is that the reader is by all accounts a stranger, and that they have looked long and hard into all of their souls.

When Jonathan and Mina finally marry, Jonathan entrusts his diary to her, his wife, bidding her only that if she were to read it never to let him know it. 

 

Mina, of course, does not in that moment realize the gravity of her decision. She binds the book in ribbon and wax, a ribbon which she wore around her untouched neck, and she seals the wax with her wedding ring, recognizing it as a symbol of the trust they have for one another. 

 

The reader makes no such vows. Their eyes breach every secret, every concealment unashamedly. Thus, they become the invisible confessor that no one asks for.

Whether they are the one who breaks the seal or whether Mina does this herself depends on how you read the story. Maybe it is best to imagine that the story is already over and Dracula is just an old dusty diary and a stack of letters laced together with a blue ribbon once worn around a lady's neck. 

 

Surely, it is easier than watching it all transpire in silence. It is easier than intercepting every letter and stealing every diary in the dead of night just to keep up with the story. 

Certainly, it is easier than being the one to break the seal.

So the work of horror is put down and the astounded reader wonders at the puppeteer's skill, to write such a harrowing and haunted tale through the mouth of another, a mouth sewn by their own cunning hands. 

It is no longer clear who is the puppet: is it the characters? Or has the writer caught the reader in their strings? 

Stoker's Shadows

 "Though we were in shelter, we could hear the rising wind, for it moaned and whistled through the rocks, and the branches crashed together... It grew colder and colder still."

(Dracula, Bram Stoker)

It was a cold, blustery day; the cold was of the wet, bitter kind; the kind that seems to grasp your very bones. Not even the heat indoors could fight it away. You could feel it seeping through the glass of every window. 

 

 

The outside world looked dreary, blurred by the wetness and the damp, and the rain's slim slippery fingers tapped on my window eerily, sometimes almost desperately.

 

By the time the afternoon rolled in the day had changed its mind tenfold, turning itself from rain to snow, and back to rain again. By then the clouds above were as thin as a dying person's skin, and the light it let loose was pale and meagre. 

 

The day was almost spent.

As I read by the window, the shadows crept out from between the pages of my book, out of the core of its very spine. Even as I held it open, transfixed by its horror, still, the shadows lingered. I expanded its leaves, extending its spine and wrenching it wide. Still, the shadows deepened.

 

 

 

 

 Dracula was made to be read on days like this: when all through the afternoon the light weens to grey; when the imminent dark of November is only hours away, and even the crook of a spine is a dark and shadowy place. 

 

The Night Before Halloween

Writing Horror on Halloween

 

It was the night before Halloween on which I sat up late, editing a scene which I'd written many moons ago. 

It seemed to get dark earlier that night, and the only thing that was to be seen in the windows was the reflections of the candles I had burning within. 

 

 

Ironically, I wrote about the darkness too. In the scene in which I dwelt that night, there was no light to see by. But, if there is not sight to write about, the writer's pen takes up other senses. The touchless dark has no surfaces or scents. But sounds it has aplenty; sounds to make the imagination go wild, conceiving apparitions, fabricating frightful fancies. I forced them all onto the poor soul who had wandered into the pitch darkness of my scene. 

 

I paused. 

It's dangerous to live this way, I thought, to be so immersed in the page before you that you do not see what goes on around. Anything could happen when the writer is so engrossed in the fictional; anything at all. 

People might be peering into their windows; a cat might creep by through the flickering shadows; a raven may call on the tree just outside. 

Would the writer notice?

Probably not. 

 

Its dangerous to live this way, to take up one's laptop and sit in a chapter all night, neither seeing nor hearing what goes on behind you, or underneath your chair. 

Better not look, that's what I say. It'll only distract you. It'll only give you a fright. 

 

And what goes on in the night is better left up to the imagination.