©2012 by Lucy Taylor. Originally published in Exotic Gothic 4 (Postscripts #28/29). Reprinted by permission of the author.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lucy Taylor is the award-winning author of seven novels, including the Stoker Award-winning The Safety of Unknown Cities, six collections, and over a hundred short stories. Her work has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, German, and Chinese.
Her most recent short fiction can be found in the anthologies The Beauty of Death: Death by Water (Independent Legions Publishing), Tales of the Lake Volume 5 (Chrystal Lake Publishing), Endless Apocalypse (Flame Tree Publishing), Monsters of Any Kind (Independent Legions Press) and A Fist Full of Dinosaurs (Charles Anderson Books). A new collection, Spree and Other Stories, was published in February 2018 by Independent Legions Publishing.
Her short story “Wingless Beasts” is included in Ellen Datlow’s The Best of the Best Horror of the Year, to be published in late 2018.
Lost Eye Films, a UK-based, independent production company, has purchased the rights for a film version of “In the Cave of the Delicate Singers” (Tor.com).
Taylor lives in the high desert outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.
NONFICTION
The H Word: Mother Knows Best
A.C. Wise | 1453 words
As a child, when something frightens you—a bad dream, or a monster under the bed—what do you do? You call for the ultimate protection: your mother. But what happens when mothers themselves are monstrous, and what makes them so? Mothers, like women in horror fiction generally, don’t tend to fare well. They suffer from the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” problem, becoming a source of terror for being too motherly, or not motherly enough.
The monstrous mothers of horror have their roots in myth and fairy tales, with the evil stepmothers of stories like Snow White as the classic example. The Brothers Grimm popularized the archetype, but in many of the original tales they retold, the evil stepmothers were mothers. The typical pattern of these tales saw the mother/stepmother growing jealous of her daughter’s youth and beauty, and seeking to punish or destroy her for it. In the most extreme cases, this would also involve cannibalism. As the Grimms shifted from mothers to stepmothers, they created a useful dichotomy. On one side, the evil, jealous stepmother; on the other the pure, loving mother who is flawless by virtue of being dead.
This dichotomy appears in Lucy Clifford’s “The New Mother,” a horror tale published in 1882. The story centers on two young girls, Blue-Eyes and the Turkey, who are tricked into being naughty by a strange girl in the woods. Their mother warns that bad behavior will force her to leave forever and send a new mother in her place, one with glass eyes and a wooden tail. The children ignore the warning, and their sweet, kind mother vanishes, leaving the eerie new mother in her place. The story ends before we learn whether the new mother is monstrous in more than appearance, though from Blue-Eyes and the Turkey’s perspective, she certainly is, and the moral to them is clear—be good and listen to your mother, or a monster will get you.
Neil Gaiman points to “The New Mother” as an inspiration for his novella, Coraline, whose wicked Other Mother has button eyes in a direct nod to the New Mother’s glass eyes. Unlike the New Mother, the Other Mother’s wickedness is directly on the page. She collects children, sews buttons over their eyes, and drains them of life. Even so, she still straddles the line between too much mothering and not enough. The Other Mother lures Coraline into her world by being a little too perfect—more fun than her real mother, cooking her favorite foods, and spoiling her rotten. However, once she has the children she collects in her clutches, she quickly becomes bored, and her love turns to neglect, leaving them to waste away.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho offers an interesting example of another mother straddling the line between too much mothering and not enough, though what makes Mrs. Bates so interesting is—spoiler alert for a sixty year old movie—during the timeframe of the movie, she doesn’t exist. The real Mrs. Bates is dead before the film opens; she is a motivating factor for horror, but throughout the movie, Norman acts as his own mother figure. Norman murdered Mrs. Bates and her lover, then exhumed her corpse and reinvented her as his own perfect ideal—a smothering, overprotective mother willing to kill in order to keep him her perfect little boy. We can surmise that the real Mrs. Bates may have been ready to move on to a new stage in her life—one without Norman at its center. In Norman’s eyes, this made her a bad mother, a monstrous one, thus his twisted reimagining goes to the opposite extreme. As “Mother,” Norman brutally murders a series of beautiful women who represent sexual temptation, thus keeping himself childlike and pure. He keeps himself innocent of death as well, pretending his mother is still alive and he hasn’t killed her, and shifting the blame for his murders onto her. As a result, Mrs. Bates-via-Norman becomes both the fairy tale wicked stepmother, hunting young women, and the sainted dead mother protecting her little boy.
In Friday the 13th (part 1), we have a real-life version of Norman Bates’ fantasy mother. When Jason Voorhees drowns due to neglectful camp counselors who are too busy getting it on, Mrs. Voorhees goes on a killing spree to avenge him. In a deranged way, she’s protecting future campers too, trying to ensure Camp Crystal Lake never reopens. Of course, her plan fails, and she transforms from overprotective mother, to mother-as-motivating-factor-for-horror. Just as Mrs. Bates motivates Norman, Mrs. Voorhees’ death motivates the surprise-he-isn’t-really-dead killing spree in Friday the 13th Part 2. Like Norman keeping his mother’s mummified corpse in the basement, Jason keeps his mother’s severed head in a makeshift shrine, undertaking his killings in her name.
Another aspect of the “too much mothering” horror trope is the monstrousness of female fertility. Being an empty vessel for Satan’s seed is one thing, but choosing when, where, and how often to procreate is a big no no. Take the xenomorphs of the Alien franchise. Their desire to propagate and determination to ensure the survival of their young is the source of their monstrousness. The ultimate embodiment is the Alien Queen, the ur-mother of the xenomorph hive, and the source of all those eggs scientists can’t seem to resist hovering their huggable faces directly over. Similarly, H.P. Lovecraft’s Shub-Niggurath, one of few Great Old Ones of his mythos explicitly named as female, is associated with fertility and frequently linked to The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, either as the same being, or as his consort. Even as a consort, however, one can assume she is at least partially responsible for those thousand young, and thus a source of monstrousness.
On the other side of the coin, we have too little mothering—neglectful and outright cruel mothers once again hearkening back to fairy tale roots. In the film Carrie, the first instance of motherly abuse shown onscreen is directly related to Carrie’s fertility, as heralded by her first period. Unlike Snow White’s stepmother, Carrie’s mother doesn’t seem fearful of Carrie replacing her so much as simply growing up and living a life of her own. In addition to being a horrifying figure in her own right, Carrie’s mother heralds monstrosity as well. When Carrie goes nuclear, her mother’s abuse is just as responsible—if not more so—as the abuse she faces from her peers.
Unlike Carrie’s mother, Regan’s mother in The Exorcist isn’t monstrous in her own right, but she causes monstrosity by not being motherly enough. Instead of her life revolving around her daughter, she has the audacity to be a single mother interested in her own career, and having friends, all the while neglecting her daughter’s spiritual upbringing. As the movie demonstrates, that kind of unmotherly behavior—to paraphrase the television series Archer—is how you get demons.
Another mother who straddles the line between saintly as wicked is the titular creature in the film Mama. As a living woman, she commits murder and causes her own accidental death along with the death of her child. In death, however, she dedicates herself to caring for two little girls—Lilly and Victoria—whose own mother is brutally murdered, and saves them from the same
fate. Mama is monstrous to other adults, but to the girls she is a protector, and in Lilly’s case, the only mother she’s ever really known. The possibility of Mama’s wicked nature is only introduced into the girls’ lives by a third mother figure, along with a new father figure. The girls’ uncle rescues them after years with Mama, and he and his girlfriend take them into their home. Mama turns vicious, but only against those she sees as threats to “her” children. The movie ends with Lilly’s death in Mama’s arms, but it is depicted as a happy reunion, while Victoria is shown on the path to healing with her newly-rediscovered family. In this way, Mama may be a rare example of a horror movie offering multiple positive mother figures.
If there’s an ultimate lesson here, it’s that mothers—like women in general in horror—can’t win. If there’s another lesson, it is this—if you find yourself in a horror story, don’t call for your mother when something goes bump in the night. Just pull the covers over your head, pretend it isn’t there, and wait until dawn.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A.C. Wise’s fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Shimmer, Tor.com, and the Year’s Best Horror Volume 10, among other places. She has two collections published with Lethe Press, and a novella forthcoming from Broken Eye Books. In addition to her fiction, she contributes a monthly review column to Apex Magazine, and the Women to Read and Non-Binary Authors to Read series to The Book Smugglers. Find her online at www.acwise.net and on twitter as @ac_wise.
Book Reviews: November 2018
Terence Taylor | 3076 words
Read This! Volume 7
New Horror Writing You Should Know
Years ago, I had a nightmare.
I sat in an armchair in a low-lit room watching television. On the screen was a close-up color image of the American flag waving in the wind. I watched in silence, filled with the same dread I would now feel seeing the Nazi or Confederate flag victoriously on display. That was all, but the deep feeling of nameless horror stayed with me long after I woke. It seemed unimaginable at the time, but today the dream feels more than a little prescient. As I work on my third vampire novel, set in a dystopian future only ten years away, I’ve been slowed by the conundrum of whether it’s even possible to conceive and write imaginary horrors while living in a present so beset by real ones.
It’s not just Trump remaking our country in his image as his raging howl of endless ego drowns out any last vestige of reasoned discourse, what little is left after years of squabbling TV commentators. It’s the increasingly casual worldwide genocides that go uncontested or punished. That anti-Semitism is rising again, along with growing intolerance of differences in gender, religion, culture, race or even country of origin. We’re controlled by leaders of an international economy built on a conceptual house of cards that threatens to fall at any negative opinion about its worth. Students bold enough to seek a higher education leave college as wage slaves with six-figure debts hanging over their heads. They’re forced to take any work they can to maintain monthly payments without penalties, while the same banks consume any inheritance that might save them with predatory reverse mortgages to their parents and grandparents.
As King George croons in “You’ll Be Back” from Hamilton, “Oceans rise, empires fall . . .” Should we pay any attention to the past, we’d see ample evidence of that truth in melting ice poles and the bankruptcy of what remained of the once-mighty nation of Greece.
My early passion for the horror genre was fueled by a search for freedom from fear in my erratic young life. The stories I read and movies I watched then were basic battles between good and evil with endings that always dispelled the darkness. Heroes overcame monstrous forces, or wicked protagonists were punished in true EC Comics style. Either left me with a satisfied sense that even if what scared me remained in my life, I could tell myself that it had an eventual end, and that one day I could rise above my current circumstances. It was only later that Lovecraft and Poe led me into a less benign world of the weird, one with no assured exit.
When horror movies rose in popularity in the 80s, began to spawn sequels that rolled into series, the defeat of their villains became less assured. By the time of Freddy Krueger, Chucky, and Jason Voorhees, it was even in question if the audience were rooting for them or their victims. The bad guys got all the good lines or best moves. It took more years than I liked for movies to go back to killing monsters to satisfy the cathartic urges of the audience, even if they returned in the next film to further the franchise. While we couldn’t be assured of a peaceful future, at least there could be a break between catastrophes. Less so now.
9/11 woke up America to what the rest of the world already knew after decades of terrorist bombings: There is no safety; any day can be your last, for no other reason than You Are Here. Once that lid is lifted, the rest of Pandora’s box comes tumbling out, from fears of pandemics and the bodily betrayal of cancer, to killer robot cars and lightning-struck plane engines, home invasions, electrical fires, bad club drugs, shoddy construction . . . the list of ways we can die at any moment is literally endless. How does an author scare anyone when everything around us has become so damnably terrifying?
What is the place for horror fiction in today’s chaotic world? More importantly, why watch movies from The Grudge to The Last Exorcist, The Babadook to Hereditary, and a host of others that, at best, tell us we can only keep our demons at bay, at worst, that they will consume all we are? Is there any reason to engage in “entertainment” that only validates the view that life is hopeless, filled only with terror and pain, inevitably ending in a death that, at best, is one we don’t see coming?
How do we escape from our own fear if even our fictions cannot? Do our lives have value, or are we bound by Samuel Beckett’s words in his 1953 novel, The Unnamable, “The search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue.” Do we sustain the daily horror of life only long enough to find the right means to end it all?
The Conspiracy against the Human Race
Thomas Ligotti
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9780143133148
Penguin Publishing Group, October 02, 2018, 272 pages
I looked for answers in Stoker winner Thomas Ligotti’s non-fiction collection of related essays, The Conspiracy against the Human Race, named after a similar text written by one of his fictional characters. That version is described as “based on the nonexistence, the imaginary nature, of everything we believe ourselves to be.” That’s a fair estimation of what Ligotti does here, in addition to defining our view of what that horror fiction is, what it does for us, and how it works. We seek sources of supernatural fear greater than our own, and want to see them defeated to give us hope. We are frightened by the unnatural as perceived in landscapes or the life-like, in puppets or dolls, the same terrain as the “uncanny valley” of disbelief in CGI animation that makes something slightly less than utterly real seem deeply disturbing. I found those passages a great reminder of why we write horror, especially as I plunge back into my novel—which makes it a convenient tome to add to any genre writer’s reference stack, next to your Elements of Style.
Ligotti breaks his thesis into six concise parts that examine aspects of identity, mortality, and horror fiction with insight and wry humor, often in its darkest discussions. The majority of the work is devoted to the debate over the intrinsic value of the self-awareness of humans. On one hand, understanding has led us to develop culture and civilization, art and architecture, science and religion. On the other, it was all created to stave off our fear of the daily nightmare of struggling to stay alive, with the full awareness of our inevitable death making it all seem pointless.
Ligotti cites a wide range of sources I was previously unfamiliar with to defend the latter opinion: Tsanoff, Bahnsen, Zapffe, Michelstaeder, Mainlander, and many more, who form a pantheon of pessimism, assuring us that the most destructive aspect of consciousness is that we are able to imagine the worst that can be. We hold
it ahead of us like a decaying carrot that nonetheless offers no deterrent to continuing on, beaten forward by the stick of survival. They tell us that our lifelong fear of death is far worse than death itself—since once it actually occurs, we no longer care about anything—barring an equally complex afterlife that no departed loved ones have cared to come back to torment us with. For the relative handful of philosophers who stand in stark contrast to the optimistic majority who claim life is good, to know that “no one gets out of here alive,” as Jim Morrison put it, is enough to kill the party.
It was all summed up rather nicely by the late Douglas Adams, who wrote, “In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” Instead of facing up to the monstrous reality of the most basic fact that life sucks, philosophical pessimists say most of us do our best to deny it. We fall for promises of a fruitful afterlife, study scientific ways to avert or delay death, or bury our fears in sybaritic enjoyment to distract us from our inevitable ends.
If you agree with the interpretation that Beckett’s The Unnamable is literary sleight of hand, that the narrator may only live and exist in the words we read on the page, as he conjectures (which he does), The Conspiracy against the Human Race reflects a parallel point of view that all we are and all we know of ourselves is equally fictional, mutually agreed upon to obscure the horror of existence and death’s impending inevitability. Like Beckett’s protagonist, we are only what we say we are. There is no individual identity, simply a construct created to reassure us that we have value. In this context, the only point to existence is the perpetual justification of it, whether in financial, social, spiritual, or ethical terms. We are rich, popular, pious, or good, but that means we are.
Nightmare Magazine, Issue 74 (November 2018) Page 9
