The title for this week is from a Lemony Snicket song. His books, and the album containing this song, are absolutely hilarious.
I'm not sure whether I'll do regular reviews. At present, I've read three books and started one more, but I feel like writing a comparison, so that's what I'm going to do.
The two books I'm going to compare are World War Z and The Graveyard Book. The latter I've started, the former I've just finished. In a decent bookstore, you'd probably find both of them in the horror section. (Then again, maybe not. The Graveyard Book is more of a children's or teen book, and World War Z is rather sci-fi. But let's look at a hypothetical, ideal bookstore, with no age boundaries.)
It's interesting to compare these two, along with 'Salem's Lot, in terms of effectiveness. I still haven't finished 'Salem's Lot, which (for the uninitiated) is a Stephen King novel about vampires. I liked the book at the beginning because it introduced a varied set of characters in order to create a pretty layered society, which I expected King to then smash apart with his vampire, sledgehammer-style. Once the killings got going, though, I found the book to be long and tedious. Partly this may have been because the choice of deaths was uninspired -- the least interesting characters went first. Partly this may have been because the vampires in question were riddled with all your basic cliches -- compounded by the fact that King intended to stick to the vampire's roots to make the book more interesting. (It didn't work in Superman Returns, and it didn't work here either.) But I think the real reason the book didn't work was because it approached fear from entirely the wrong direction. There are few light moments in the book, and the human characters feel one, unambiguous shade of fear towards the vampires, and King expects us to do the same. For any writers out there, noobs or otherwise, let me say this: this is boring. Horror is a very layered feeling. Disgust, curiosity, xenophobia, and uncompromising terror are all different aspects of it. Neil Gaiman gets it right; more on that in a minute.
Horror is a very misleading term. My parents, and some of my friends, are always talking about how horror movies are the blood-and-guts type: "Saw", "Hostel", "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", "The Exorcist". (By the way, ever wonder why it's called "The Exorcist" and not "The Exorcism"? Me, too. I need to see that movie to find out why.) Anyway. That's all well and good, but what about films like The Blair Witch Project, or Poltergeist, or even Jaws? Those movies are made to scare you out of fear of the unknown, be it that thing hiding in the dark, the clown draped over your bedroom chair, or the shark in the water. Hell, throw Ghostbusters in there, that's got a little horror. My point is that there are many different aspects of horror. Blood and guts is not the only part of it. Horror is a feeling, and we can all experience it in different ways.
Lest you think this is too much about stuff that I'm not reading this summer, let me link this very smoothly to World War Z. I wish Max Brooks had learned about layering horror before he'd written this book. I started out reading it going, "Oh, zombies! Hooray!" but once the novelty wore off, it got dull and pointless. Okay, here are some dead things killing five people in different ways. So? The interesting part became how the world survived the infestation, but even that was riddled with cliches: the USA is the first to advance aggressively, after having massively screwed up on the battlefront; people start eating each other for food; political exploits, etc. etc. Every step, I could have guessed. Yet it became an entertaining read after a time because, well, it was written so well, and maybe because it was so varied. I need to think about it for a bit, why I got back into it, but about halfway through the book something clicked and I tore through it with gusto.
And this was completely different from my experience upon opening The Graveyard Book. See, here's what I've been leading up to: how Neil Gaiman treats horror. Short version: it's not all horror. Oh, sure, there are huge elements of it: unnatural otherworldy beings, a murder, and enough ghosts to cool several walk-in refrigerators. But it's treated like a pretty natural tale set in completely unnatural circumstances. The horror is THERE: I was scared out of my skin by a couple of the beings in the first chapters, but the whole feel of the book is much more invigorating and interesting.
I guess this post has rambled on long enough, and possibly most of you have stopped reading by this point, but my whole point is that horror is varied, and that's the only way to write it. Now if only we could have more Graveyard books and fewer zombie flicks.
P.S. I do need to get ahold of The Zombie Survival Guide. I've grown a little addicted to Max Brooks' work.
No comments:
Post a Comment