The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice (2019).

There are some books that require a bit of homework.  That sounds like a bummer, I know.  The real kick in the teeth is discovering that if you want to know more about a story you really like, then sometimes this means you're faced with a choice.  Do you steel yourself, roll up your sleeves, and take the plunge into all the historical archives and works of criticism that can help you gain a greater understanding of what it is that makes your favorite books and films work so well?  Or do you just sit back, shrug, and admit that you'll probably never understand what makes so much as a simple Don Bluth movie stick in the memory long after childhood is in the rearview mirror?  I think that's a false choice, by the way.  All that's required to understand what makes any work of art either function or fail so well is a willingness to be engrossed in the craft of study and scholarship.  It's as simple as that, though if I'm being honest, I reckon most of us just choose to shrug and walk away, rather than get down to examining the bones of our favorite story fossils.  Part of the reason for that seems to be that it takes a certain kind of mind to get into the work of a proper analysis of the writing arts.  It kind of seems as if some folks out there have this turn of mind that makes the idea of unpacking the artistry of movies, novels, and short stories desirable, in some strange way.  I'm told it's a frame of mind that's become a lot more acceptable to current social standards these days, yet somehow I think the need for a defense of some sort still remains.

The fact of the matter is that storytelling is a complex process.  It's one that requires a great deal of patience and skill if any of us ever wants to get a better understanding of why a book like Lord of the Rings has been able to stick around all these years.  Sometimes the folks who write books like this are able to give the curious a bit of help, here and there.  Tolkien, for instance, was considerate (or else just plain careless) enough to be willing to talk about the thought processes that went into the making of Middle Earth.  His letters are a treasure trove of what goes on in the mind of some nerds when they think the sports jocks aren't listening, and they're out of easy punching and locker stuffing distance.  The long and short of it is that this guy had one hell of an outsized Imagination.  The kind that's able to fashion entire secondary worlds with the type of skill that seems effortless, yet which the written record reveals took a great deal of trial and error.  If you ever want to find out why the world still can't seem to get enough about Hobbits, then the letters and critical comments on the nature of writing made by the author of LOTR are still the best place to start.  Tolkien's a pretty good example of what I mean when I say that there are some works of fiction where the audience has to do its homework if any of us ever wants a clearer understanding of what makes a place like Middle Earth so real to most readers today.

There is a kind of flip-side to this, however.  These are the works where its impossible for the critic to say much of anything about the nature of the work in front of them.  This is the case I wound up with when I sat down to review an odd sounding tale called The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice.  Like most of you reading these words, I'd never heard of the piece before in my life.  It was just one of those titles whose cover must have had enough skill to catch my eye.  Going just by a glance at the cover, the whole thing sort of puts me in mind of a lot of those old children's books I used to devour when I was a kid.  These were the nursery texts that await all the developing young bookworms who've managed to graduate beyond the realm of Dr. Seuss and Richard Scarry, and are perhaps able to surprise even themselves to discover that they want more.  It's what happened to me, anyway.  So that's how I came to learn about the fables of Aesop, the poetry of Jack Prelutsky, and the works of authors like Maurice Sendak and Kenneth Graham.  These stories were something of a level or two above the primer level of reading that guys like Ted Geisel specialized in.  The prose was unrhymed and the sentence structure and the situations they described could sometimes by a bit more complex than the exploits of The Cat in the Hat.  For one thing, a lot of the old children's fare I'm thinking of now was not afraid to tackle complex situations, such as the loss of innocence, and the need to reconnect with the past.

Those are the kind of lessons taught by Graham's The Wind in the Willows, or Antoine Exupery's The Little Prince.  It was from pre-teen scribblers like Prelutsky and Alvin Schwartz that I first began to get an understanding that fiction was capable of scaling a lot of incredible heights.  The cover for the Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice put me in mind right away of a lot of the content of those pre-teen young reader titles.  It has that kind of old school charm that's reminiscent of art styles of Sendak or Arnold Lobel, while also putting me at least in mind of a volume of poems edited by Prelutsky, and featuring pictures by the second illustrator mentioned above.  What I guess I've been trying to say is that somehow, taking a look at this text was adequate enough to put me in a proper nostalgic frame of mind to the point where I finally decided to buy a copy and see what it was all about.  Beyond all this backstory, however, the real point is that this is one of those cases where I'm going in just as blind as the reader.  I knew very little about the text under discussion here today, and after having gone through it, I'm still pretty much at the same disadvantage as everyone else.  It means we both get to examine a work of fiction on more or less the same footing.  So with that in mind, this is what happened.

The whole thing starts out with an Author's Note by the American poet and translator A.E. Stallings.  Right away, she makes presents us with a quirky framing device for how we're to read this work.  "When I heard that a rare volume had arrived in Athens at the Gennadius Library, I made an appointment to see it. The book was an early edition of the Batrachomyomachia (“The Battle between the Frogs and Mice”), printed in Germany in 1513, and edited by the poet Thielemann Conradi (1485–1522). In fact, this edition is the first Greek book published in Germany, and is one of only two known copies in existence. This mock-heroic epic, originally ascribed to Homer himself, proves to be a pivotal text—as well as wildly popular—for the Renaissance and the reintroduction of Greek to Western Europe.  It seems I had been the only person to request an audience with the physical book since the library acquired it. How strange that I could just take this ancient and fragile text to a desk to sit down with it and flip through its pages! (I did have to use a special book support, so as not to damage the binding, but I wasn’t required to wear gloves.) A couple of things surprised me about it—its modest size for one (about the dimensions of a classic Moleskine notebook, only much thinner).

"I also noticed that there were some tiny, tiny marginalia, faint, scratched in pencil. Also, some small scraps of paper that fell out of the book. They turned out to be used Athens Metro tickets—perhaps placed in the pages as bookmarks. These pieces of paper also had some  pencil marks scratched on them, in what I would call the same hand. I confess that I pocketed the scraps to examine later. I would then return to look at the marginalia in the Greek text. At home, under a magnifying glass, it was clear that these writings amounted to a sort of critical introduction to the text. The marginalia in the book itself turned out to be a lively English verse translation, with copious notes. I have made some minor modifications to the translation to reflect the Greek text in Martin L. West’s 2003 Loeb edition, and added information from the 2018 commentary—the first such in English—by Christensen and Robinson. The scholar and translator signs himself as A. Nony Mouse...I give you as much as I could of the paper scraps below (1-2)".  From here, the reader is given a most curious form of introduction.

"While the epic of our tribe is not attested in human literary sources until the 1st century A.D. (Martial alludes to it, as does Statius), references to a mouse battle far predate that period. Depictions of a battle with mice and cats adorn ancient Egyptian papyruses from as far back as the 14th century B.C. And Alexander the Great—so-called to distinguish himself from Alexander the (Cheese)-Grater, the famouse general—according to Plutarch, referred to an epic battle between the Macedonians and Spartans (330 B.C.) as a “myomachia”—a mouse battle. In 1983, fragments were discovered of an earlier epic poem, from the 2nd or 3rd century B.C., “The Battle of the Weasel and the Mice.” The BMM [Editor: Batrachomyomachia] seems to refer to this earlier battle. This tale was evidently a popular motif for depiction on tavern walls. The poem is unusual among ancient parodies, even other apocrypha ascribed to Homer, for being whimsical rather than satiric. The poem exhibits charm as well as pathos (or bathos, as humans might describe the epic sufferings of smaller creatures). Steeped in the Homeric tradition, its language, formulae, meter, and tropes, the poem was a favorite school text from the Byzantine period on, an entry point to the longer and more serious epics, with the added attraction of animal characters. [Editor: I would add that evidently the motivation for Christensen’s and Robinson’s 2018 commentary was again in using the text as an introduction to Homer.] Indeed, in its depictions of the goddess Athena wearing homespun and borrowing money with interest, it goes even further than Homer in “humanizing” the gods. The poet relishes the juxtapositions of scale—as Giants and Gods are to humans, so humans to the mice.

" Interestingly, there is no mention of Apollo in the poem. Apollo in Homer is referred to as “Smintheus”—the mouse god. (“Sminthus” was mouse in Cretan, although Aeschylus also uses that word.) And there is reason to believe that mice were honored in the Troad at Chryse and Hamaxitos in connection with the god, whose cult statue depicted him with a mouse. (See Strabo and Aelian.) Mice were propitiated in worship as a means of discouraging them from destroying crops in the fields. The 2nd-century A.D. travel-writer Pausanias also mentions a temple to Artemis Myasia on the road to Arcadia. Pausanias doesn’t speculate on the meaning of this name, but his small travelling companion, Pawsanias, explains that “Myasia” comes not from “mystery,” but from the Greek for mouse, μῦς—Artemis the Mouse Goddess. As Artemis is the sister of Apollo, it makes sense that she also has a mouse form and association.2 There is also a mouse Demeter (Demeter Myasia), no doubt because of her association with the earth and with grain. Mice tend to symbolize for humans the twin opposing forces of fertility and plague. Mice and humans eat the same food and share the same dwelling places, which makes them competitors as well as companions, and mice often stand in for men in fable and verse. For men as well as mice, the poet Robert Burns reminds us, “the best laid schemes . . . / gang aft agley.”

"... Mice may also turn the tide of human battle. There are two passages associating mice with warfare in the 5th-century B.C. Histories of Herodotus. In one instance, when the Persians seek to conquer the Scythians, the Scythians send a strange message—a mouse, a frog, a bird, and five arrows, without comment (4.131, 132). The Persians are perplexed as to the meaning. One theory was that it was meant as a surrender (of earth and water and themselves). But another of Darius’s advisors interprets it thus: “If you do not become birds and fly away into the sky or become mice and burrow into the earth or become frogs and leap into the lakes, there will be no homecoming for you, for we will shoot you down with our arrows” (the translation is Grene’s). I would myself point out that the conjunction of frog, mouse, and bird perhaps points to an ancient fable popular in the East and which comes to us through two of Aesop’s fables—the fable is a warning about the dangers of inappropriate alliances. (See below for more on the fable, which is clearly related to our epic.)

"In another instance out of Herodotus (2.141), mice destroy a human army. The Egyptian King Sethos is concerned that a great army, led by Sennacherib, king of the Arabians and Assyrians, will attack Egypt. But in a dream he is told by a god that he will be sent allies. The allies turn out to be the field mice, who at night gnaw at the enemy  army’s quivers and bows and bow strings and the handles of their shields, so that in the morning the army fled “defenseless.” A version of this story also appears in the Old Testament (2 Kings 19:35), but there the host of mice is only referred to obliquely as an “angel of the lord.” (Byron’s memorable poem, “The Destruction of Sennacherib,” unfortunately makes no mention of the mice.) A version of this tale also appears in the Chinese annals...While the fables of Aesop—according to Herodotus a slave and story writer of the 6th century B.C.—contain many stories of mice (“The Country Mouse and the City Mouse,” for instance) and of frogs (“The Frogs Seek a King,” etc.), there are two related fables about an unlikely friendship between a mouse and a frog that ends tragically. In both versions, a mouse and a frog become friends, the frog invites the mouse to his house, the mouse says he cannot swim, and the frog ties the mouse to his foot, only to end up drowning him. A deus-exmachina appearance of a bird means the frog comes to a grim fate as well. This ancient story of the frog and the mouse was widely known in the East. (The 13th-century Persian poet Rumi has a charming version of it.)

"The second, more elaborate Aesop version goes thus (Gibbs translation): Back when all the animals spoke the same language, the mouse became friends with a frog and invited him to dinner. The mouse then took the frog into a storeroom filled to the rafters with bread, meat, cheese, olives, and dried figs and said, “Eat!” Since the mouse had shown him such warm hospitality, the frog said to the mouse, “Now you must come to my place for dinner, so that I can show you some warm hospitality too.” The frog then led the mouse to the pond and said to him, “Dive into the water!” The mouse said, “But I don’t know how to dive!” So the frog said, “I will teach you.” He used a piece of string to tie the mouse’s foot to his own and then jumped into the pond, dragging the mouse down with him. As the mouse was choking, he said, “Even if I’m dead and you’re still alive, I will get my revenge!” The frog then plunged down into the water, drowning the mouse. As the mouse’s body floated to the surface of the water and drifted along, a raven grabbed hold of it together with the frog who was still tied to the mouse by the string. After the raven finished eating the mouse he then grabbed the frog. In this way the mouse got his revenge on the frog.

"The points of similarity with our epic are many—the mouse, and the frog, the mention of a bird of prey, the drowning, the fault (or deviousness) of the frog, and the catalogue of human food associated with the mouse. The real revenge, however, of the mouse is, I would say, our poem, which memorializes both the noble bravery of the mice and the turpitude of frogs. The courage of mice is of course a commonplace in literature. Consider Christopher Smart, “For the Mouse is a creature of great personal valor,” C. S. Lewis’s valiant Reepicheep, E. B. White’s plucky Stuart Little, or Kate DiCamillo’s Despereaux. The frogs in Aesop’s fables are consistent in their stupidity (consider the story “The Frogs Seek a King”), their booming bravado, and their uselessness in action. For frogs in battle, consider the fable of “The Frog, the Water Snake, and the Viper.” In this tale, the water snake and the viper fight over their territory in the marsh. The frogs, who hate the water snake, offer to be allies of the viper, but in the end, only sit on the sidelines croaking their support, proving both treacherous and ineffectual.

"In the Renaissance, versions of Aesop’s “The Frog and the Mouse” began to be provided with a backstory—that the frog and mouse are battling over the territory of the marsh when they are carried off by a kite. This variant seems to owe something to our epic. It also seems likely that the composer of our epic was familiar with this Aesop story and elaborated it, with mouse-ish ingenuity, into the battle narrative we now have (3-7)".  It's with this strange context setting the stage that I soon found myself looking into the peculiar history known as The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Chimaera (1851).

He is best remembered, if he's known for anything at all, as one of the main architects of the modern Horror genre.  This seems to have been the ultimate fate of the reputation of the early 19th century American writer known as Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Arriving in this world in the year 1804, he was a natural born son of New England.  Not only is that a relevant real-life plot detail, it also turned out to be the main shaping factor in the life and growth of the artist's mind.  His birthplace was none other than Salem, Massachusetts, home of the infamous Witch Trials.  To give an impression of just how much of a long shadow this event and its entire social milieu have managed to cast over American history, it is possible to argue that while there were other atrocities committed by the Puritans in their chequered and problematic history of settling on these Shores, there appears to have been something iconic about the Trials which has allowed it to standout as the guiding symbol of America's original sin.  The historical image and notion of Puritans turning their own moral decay and bigotry at last against their own kind, like a snake eating its tail, seems to act as the best summation of what happens when a society begins to go wrong.  It suggests that if the ideology of the original Plymouth Settlers can be spoken of as serving any kind of purposes, then its utility was of the most ironic kind.  The purpose of Puritanism, it seems, is to cancel itself out.

As a result, what makes the very fact of the Witch Trials so natural as a symbol is that it is somehow able to encompass a multitude of ethical failures, both personal and social, that have since been recognized as a catalogue of all of the major faults and transgressions for which the early European settlers to America were guilty of.  It includes the usual list of suspects, the chiefest of which is the allowance and legal sanctioning of slavery, prejudice, and persecution of others into the law of the land.  The others, in this case, were and are, of course, Africans, Jamaicans, and Native Americans as the most prominent victims of Puritanism.  It's this ironic accomplishment which has allowed the Plymouth colonizers and their immediate descendants the dubious honor of two further achievements, both of which have served to preserve and hold an awareness of their toxicity and depravity as a kind of memorial enshrined forever in our popular culture.  On the one hand, it was the Puritans who have given to, and cemented for American history its first and longest lasting notion of national evil.  The second, artistic correlate of this ironic accomplishment is that it wouldn't surprise me to learn that it was the legacy of fanatics like Cotton Mather and the Witch Trial persecutors who have been able to shape a lot of the contours and iconography of what we now know as Halloween.  It's of course true enough that a lot of the trappings of our Nation's most popular Autumn Festival have their roots in Ancient Celtic Traditions.  However, it seems as if the sins of the Puritans gave us an updated set of props and icons that have allowed this fundamentally antiquarian celebration to find its proper American voice.

This can best be demonstrated by recalling how everything that we know about Halloween always comes down to, or else includes the same set of images.  These being the time honored picture of witches and black cats on broomsticks, along with the idea of the haunted house with plenty of skeletons in all the closets.  These are all concepts that have come to define what the holiday means for us every time Autumn roles around.  However, there's one other element to this shared iconography that I don't think most of us have given enough attention to.  Part of that is down to the way familiarity makes the heart grow, not so much cold, as inattentive, and hence unobservant.  We remember the witches and haunted houses well enough.  Have you ever stopped to notice or pay attention to the kind of imaginative landscape in which all of these icons have their place, though?  The answer, of course, is yes and no.  Yeah, it's true, some of us might have spared a glance at the kind of topographic atmosphere in which the primary symbols of Halloween take place.  However, I wonder how many of us have ever stopped to ponder just what the prototypical setting of All Hallow's means, or amounts to.  In terms of set dressing, the typical All Saint's Eve backdrop has remained more or less the same ever since the Holiday was cemented into a part of the Nation's identity.  You've got these wide open, creepy looking fields that are either barren roads, or else its a stretch of rural farmland with either a hollowed out cornfield, or else a glowing pumpkin patch to provide a few background details.  This is about as far as most of us can get when it comes to conjuring up the stage setting for a Halloween atmosphere.

The one final detail that's needed to complete this picture is just one, simple observation.  Most of it tends to have this New England flavor to it.  Have you ever noticed that?  Think about it.  The basic backdrop of the typical American Halloween just tends to have that specific, regional kind of feel about the place.  It's like something you can tell just by looking.  It's a pervasive sense of atmosphere that you can't quite get anywhere else.  It just doesn't have quite the same vibe if you were to try and translate it into a setting such as the Louisiana bayou territory.  Places like that are more than capable of having an October atmosphere all its own, and that's just the point.  A sense of place that's steeped in, say, the carry-overs from old African, Creole, or Cajun traditions might have an appropriate flavor.  It even forms an essential part of Halloween.  It's just not the kind of vibe you get from that Autumn cornfield or Pumpkin patch which looks like it could be anywhere from the Midwest to the Nor-East.  That's because out most typical image of the Hallows stage setting was born and raised in the old Yankee country.  It was in the same New England territory that held the Witch Trials, and in which Hawthorne grew up that created the first initial iconography for America's Premier Autumn Festival.  In that sense, it's almost possible to say that Hawthorne grew up amidst the symbols and imagery of Halloween.

It was always just a part of the natural atmosphere that he breathed, both as a man, and an artist.  It explains why even his lightest stories tend to have this sense of soft, faded colors to them, like when the leaves start to turn into rich hues of red, yellow, and brown.  It seems a more or less inescapable fact that Hawthorne is a natural, Autumnal writer.  Born and raised in the Nation's pumpkin patch, he emerged as an Autumn voice.  Someone who is in the way of being a spokesmen for that time of year, born and bred.  It even makes a certain amount of sense when you stop and consider that with short stories like "Young Goodmen Brown", and "The Minister's Black Veil", or novels like House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne also has to stand as one of the key builders of the Holiday as we now celebrate it.  Heck, he's even the first artist to make mention of, and put the image of the Jack O' Lantern to good use in his writings.  So in that light, among other reasons, it makes sense to peg him one of the Nation's first great Horror writers.  I don't think this is a reputation that can ever be challenged, nor do I think it should be.  I just find it interesting that the same creative mind that helped pioneer the American Gothic (the kind of artist who could be described as Stephen King's metaphorical grandfather, in other words) was also capable of being something in the way of a writer for kids.  Here's the part I'm sure most folks aren't aware of.  Entertain conjecture that one of America' foremost tellers in Tales of Terror was also the author of collections with titles like A Wonder Book for Boys and Girls.  It's not the kind of thing you might expect.  It's like learning that someone like Lovecraft was fond of nursery rhymes.

Such a picture just creates too much cognitive dissonance to take seriously.  Hawthorne presents a milder, and hopefully therefore graspable version of the same conundrum.  How does someone with a reputation for telling scary stories come to write not just a children's story, but a whole book full of them?  When you put it like that, I'll have to admit the very idea sounds like an anomaly.  I can count the number of times its happened on the fingers of one hand.  It's a list that includes the likes of Steve King, Edith Nesbit, Dean Koontz, and Hawthorne.  Put that all together and you've got the a publishing phenomenon that still counts as enough of a rarity to be almost unheard of.  I'm also not sure its fair to include authors like Alvin Schwartz, R.L. Stine, Bruce Coville, or the Brothers Grimm in that catalogue.  That's because these are all examples of artists who went out of their way to write for a Young Adult market, in one case even before the market could be said to exist.  Instead, what I'm focused on here is writers of certifiable adult Gothic fiction, who have then turned around and graced us with a family friendly offering for the kiddies.  Like I've said, it's happen so few times in the past that there's still this air of novelty about, except in Hawthorne's case it's perhaps as weird as, say, discovering that a tome like The Secret Garden was Lovecraft's favorite book (which it isn't, so far as I know).

Instead, it's more the sort of left field novelty that you might not expect, yet there's still enough of a sense of intriguing about such an enterprise that you're willing to offer a cautious "Go On?" sort of encouragement.  I'll be the first to admit that I've never really looked into the children's entertainment side of Hawthorne's writings before.  So in a sense I'm going in just as blind as the rest of you as we take a look at what appears to be a retelling of Classical Mythology known as "The Chimaera".

Stephen King's Skeleton Crew: The Monkey (1980).

A while back I wound up delivering an article I didn't, in the strictest sense, intend to write.  A short story like "The Monkey" is one of those stories I knew I was going to have to get around to sooner or later.  It's been one of those long-term items on a hypothetical list of artworks that would have to get their day in the spotlight on this site one day.  The only catch was that for the longest time I was operating under the assumption that such a seemingly simple short story like this, while maybe popular among Stephen King fans, was still not the kind of high profile idea that a place like Hollywood would have all that much interest in these days.  I'd have thought this went double for an industry whose soul focus (both at the time and even now) still seems to be squarely fixed on the kind of properties that were best guaranteed to be the next major tentpole franchise.  If it wasn't a comic book or a major Fantasy or Sci-Fi franchise, then it didn't exist so far as the current incarnation of Tinseltown was concerned.  So of course I was proven wrong somehow.  It just seems to be one of the grand unspoken laws of the universe, or something, to always cheat the next would-be prophet to come along.  Whatever the case, I'll be honest, I was just as surprised as anyone to discover that Neon Pictures had snapped up the adaptation rights to what was otherwise considered to be this small and insular bit of latter day pulp fiction.  For the longest time, I thought its popularity was limited to the confines to Horror fandom.  In other words, while I thought it was good, I never would have guessed that it had any kind of shelf life awareness outside its own unique circles of and within the confines of the Horror genre.

Apparently, Hollywood was eager to prove me wrong.  So when the first trailer for the film adaptation dropped it came as a genuine surprise.  Though if I'm being honest, I was also cautiously optimistic.  A lot of the reason for that is down to a basic understanding of the kind of narrative we're dealing with here.  The idea of a plot revolving around a supernaturally possessed demonic toy was an old one even before King got his Inspiration for this particular work.  It's a concept that I've been able to trace as far back to a 1920s literary ghost story by M.R. James.  And even long before him, the very notion of a spectrally animated inanimate object probably owes its ultimate origin to ancient works of folklore, such as the Golem legend.  So it's not the most original concept King's got a hold of here, yet it can be fun whenever the writer manages to do it right.  In a case like this, what we're dealing with here is the kind of narrative that can be made to work in at least one of two possible approaches.  It can be played straight, or else done tongue-in-cheek.  King narrates the whole thing straightforward, while Oz Perkins decided to see if he could try hand at this material in a more humorous, parodic route.  This is something that's pretty obvious from the way the body count stacks up in the film adaption.  You can tell this even from just a casual glimpse at what we're shown in the trailers.  Where it's apparent that with few exceptions, all the deaths are handled in a clear tone of macabre humor.  Almost each moment of supernatural violence is never once displayed with anything like a complete straight face.  Instead, it's like watching a series of jokes being setup and told in a series of grisly, yet amusing punchlines.

This was all something I could pick up on just from the trailers, and like I said, I greeted it all with a note of hopeful caution.  That's because while I had experienced a straightforward rendition of this idea, I was also well aware of just how possible it was to turn this same concept into a complete genre send-up.  There's a lot of humor that's still left waiting to be mined in a notion like this.  It was this gut level understanding that made me somewhat eager to see what Oz Perkins could do with King's original material.  I've already written up my thoughts on the final results in an earlier post.  It can all be read about here.  To summarize a long story, the biggest reason why I have to call the film version a failure is because it's clear the mind of the director is being pulled in two directions at once, and he can never make up his mind what sort of tone he's supposed to tell the story in.  This means the narrative proper has to suffer from a lot of forced comedy that has this hollow, artificial quality to it.  This is an element that refuses to jibe and meld with the more serious qualities that lurk just underneath all the attempts at humor.  It's pretty clear that what we've been given counts less as an honest adaptation, and is better described as an unfortunate snapshot of the film's director in a moment of personal crisis.  It's clear enough that Oz Perkins was going through a grieving process of his own while making the film.

He'd lost first his famous father way back in the 80s, and then just recently his mother sometime before he commenced work on this aborted attempt at a King adaptation, and it left a mark the director.  This is obvious enough once you realize the way the film telegraphs Perkins' inability to know just what to do with the clashing emotions and thoughts that were running through his mind as he tried (and hence failed) to assemble the pictures he'd made into a coherent narrative.  It's pretty clear that was something of an impossible task for someone who still couldn't figure out how to handle his own grieving process.  It's the sort of situation where the artist really should have just taken time out for himself.  Get a better grip on his feelings, and see how things looked once he's had time to process his experiences into a more rational framework.  I almost want to say the film version of the "Monkey" is less a film, and more a textbook snapshot of the artist's inner turmoil once he's discovered that he's having a harder time time dealing with the loss of his parents than he might have expected.  That's a serious matter, one that needs to be handled with greater care than Perkins allowed himself to have.  For this reason, while I can't call the movie a good adaptation, I am willing to let it slide and to wish the director well.

That just leaves us with the original source material to talk about.  Like I said, I knew I'd have to get around to this story sooner or later.  I just always thought that time would be somewhere further down the line.  The failure of Perkins' efforts, however, has sort of forced my hand in the matter.  It now seems like I'm going to have to go out of my way to point out what it is about this simple short story that has made it popular enough to get the attention of Hollywood, and why it's still cited as one of the minor yet genuine classics in King's career.  This, then, is a close look a the tale of "The Monkey".

Wait Until Dark (1967).

There have been films which act as turning points in the history of cinema.  It doesn't happen often, yet when it does occur, most audiences are quick to notice.  Perhaps one of the biggest movies to break new ground, and bring a different sensibility and outlook to the big screen happened a long time ago, in 1960.  That's the year Alfred Hitchcock debuted a neat and concise little thriller known as Psycho on the big screen.  The way it worked was down to a number of factors.  On the one hand, a director lauded for his work on such high concept films like Notorious, Rear Window, and North By Northwest was starting to get fed up with the way audiences had begun to pigeonhole his efforts as the work of a genre artist.  Hitch never minded working in what might be termed the Gothic Noir field.  From pretty much the first to last, it's what was solid for him.  It was the one type of story which allowed him to keep his enthusiasm for filmmaking alive and well.  What bothered him was that he didn't like the way tastemakers and critics were trying to fence him in, and section his work off from what they were ready to label as the more legitimate forms of storytelling.  It's a criticism as old as the 19th century, or thereabouts.  It's also one that the Horror genre in particular has had to grapple with due to its constant reputation as the black sheep of the popular genres.  It seems to have been an awareness of this reputation which led Hitch toward a desire to see if he could take the pulpiest concept and material associated with the genre, and make Art out of it.

There's a hell of a lot more to that story worth telling someday, yet for the purpose of this article, that's one of the basic building block motivations behind the creation of Psycho.  I think the fact that audiences are still talking about that film all these years is a testament to just how well Hitchcock has been able to achieve his goals.  The story of Norman Bates represents a film which was able not just to break itself out the pulp ghetto to which other works like it had been consigned.  It also functions as one of those tales whose impact turns out to be so big that it kind of rewrites the rules for how films in general, and stories like itself in particular were made and viewed.  When I call Psycho a turning point, there's no real exaggeration in that statement.  Nor am I at all alone in making such a judgement call.  It's a film that's been described as a turning point in Hollywood as a whole.  A good way to describe it is to call it a story which functions as both a beginning, and an ending.  On the one hand, it marked the end of the sort of classical approach to filmmaking which was something of the high standard during Tinseltown's Golden Age.  By proving that it was possible to take a fundamentally B-level Drive-In premise, and give the whole thing a solid A-list treatment, Hitchcock proved not only that Horror has its place, it can also make a valid claim for itself as a legitimate form of Art.  The fact he was able to succeed in this endeavor marks Psycho as a cinematic beginning on a number of various levels.

For the purposes of this review, the one aspect of the film that needs to be singled out is also the one most audiences are still familiar with.  I've heard Psycho described as the first Slasher flick, and there's plenty of good reason for that assessment.  It's not because there's any originality to had in terms of the story proper.  The figure of the deadly serial killer who lurks in the shadows, just out of the line of sight, was already something of a standard trope by the mid to late 1930s.  A good example of just how old the idea is as a creative concept can be gauged by going back to two films which share the same antagonist.  One is a legit forgotten B flick known as House of Horror, and the other is a Basil Rathbone, Sherlock Holmes vehicle called Pearl of Death.  Both films hail from the year 1946, and each features the same character as the antagonist.  He was this homicidal maniac known as the Creeper (no, not that one) and I guess the best way to describe him is that he was the closest anyone ever got to being the Freddy Krueger of his era.  The fact that no one remembers this cinematic psycho slasher today stands as a testament to just how little of an impact the Creeper left on filmgoers, even back during the 40s.  

What allowed Norman Bates to run, where the Creeper could only walk (and then not even that far), is down to more than just Hitchcock's much touted genius as a visual stylist.  While a lot of his greatness with the camera is on display, viewers looking for anything like an actual visual feast might just come away disappointed.  The director's handling of the lens on the Perkins-Leigh vehicle is so controlled it almost has to be labeled as an example of the Spartan Thriller.  To be bothered by this particular quality is to mistake one single tree for the entire forest.  The real engine that allowed Psycho not just to run, but also discover a whole new stratosphere, lies not in the quality of its images, but rather in the script.  It's story is one that remembers that Horror can have a sophistication all its own, and Hitchcock must have been the kind of perceptive reader who was able to recognize aspects and ideas like this, because he took what is basically schlock, and made it into something worthy of being called a museum piece.  There's one particular aspect to the story of the various goings on in and around the infamous Bates Motel that adds fuel to the idea of its being a major turning point.  It marks the first time that the idea of the Stalker Slasher was, not just put front and center as the main character of such a story (and that is one of the great hidden conceits of the picture; its not that the protagonist is killed off halfway through the story, its that when we meet the real main lead, we don't recognize him as such at first).  In addition, the film also marks the first time that the Slasher is marked with a specific, recognizable, tonal quality.

I've said that Norman Bates is not a new characterization in the strictest sense.  The figure of the Slasher has been around far longer than the advent of film.  Going by a strict sense of chronology, the first modern character to codify the trope is the culprit of Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue".  Keeping this fact in mind means that one of the ironies of Norman is that he represents a leap forward in the genre by looking back to his Gothic roots.  If the peculiar Mr. Bates now functions as the first official Slasher in cinema history, then part of the reason for that is because he represents an even greater sense of artistic transition than that of going from the Old to the New Hollywood.  He's the first time the villain of what is ostensibly a crime thriller was ever painted in shades that designate him as the first major Horror figure of Hollywood's New Wave.  This is an achievement for which Hitchcock and his main star, Anthony Perkins, tend to be the ones to receive all the accolades for.  It's pretty easy to see why this is the case.  Hitch and his film were the first out of the starting gate.  Hence, they got to be the ones to break new-old-ground.  It's a simple case of "To the victor go the spoils" so far as critics and audiences are concerned.  Now, to be fair, all of that praise is more than well earned.  What I don't believe it should do is blind genre fans and movie history buffs to the fact that Psycho counts as merely the first (albeit very major) stepping stone in a continuing line of cinematic development.  Norman was just the first modern Slasher of the movies.  There were others who followed after in his train.

This is also a generally acknowledged fact.  Where even the most die-hard fans tend to go wrong is the belief that there's this gap of a whole decade between the breakout Hitchcock performance, followed by Tobe Hooper's updating of the concept way later with 1973's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, followed up a few short years after with 1978's Halloween.  Again, to be fair, there is a clear line of descent between Norm Bates, Leatherface, and Mike Myers than can never be ignored.  What I think most cinema buffs have lost sight of, however, is the awareness that there was at least one more major film which ended up making a contribution to the development of the modern Slasher Horror movie.  Unlike the efforts of Hitchcock, Tobe Hooper, and John Carpenter, however, this is one crucial piece of film trivia which has managed to get lost in the shuffle.  If I had to give a reason for why this is the case, then perhaps a line of dialogue from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe offers the best explanation.  "One can't mind everything at once", and that seems to be what's happened here with the film under discussion today.  All of which is to say that there is this one movie in particular which has been overlooked in the development of the modern Horror film.  Much like Psycho, this also serves as something of a snapshot of the modern Horror genre in a moment of transition.  This makes it well worth a look at in terms of its meaning for the format as we know it today.  It an interesting, overlooked film called Wait Until Dark.

Apollo 18 (2011).

There have been a number of complaints made against the Found Footage film.  Off the top of my head, the most common ones tend to come down to a combination of formatting and plotting.  On the former side of things, you tend to hear complaints about the so-called "Shaky Camera Technique".  Thanks to the bumper crop proliferation that the sub-genre has undergone in these post-Blair Witch years, there's only too many examples for the reader to choose from if its a list of usual suspects you're looking for.  The lowest hanging fruit on this particular pinata tree might still belong to the film that started it all.  Even to this day, you hear either new or longtime viewers griping about how the camera work in Sanchez and Myrick's breakout project is guilty of a multitude of faults.  Boiled down to its essence, the basic claim is that the cinematography of a film like Blair Witch and the rest that followed in its train is lacking in a proper sense of visual artistry.  It is "unprofessional" in the purest sense of the term.  The problem with this common trope of complaint is that sooner or later it always begs one simple question.  What is the perfect cinematic image?  The minute you start down that road, you might just surprise yourself by asking a sort of inconvenient question.  One that's all the more frustrating for seeming to be forever joined at the hip to the idea of cinematic perfection.  How do you know what's hip today won't be passe tomorrow?

Let me give you an example of what I mean.  For the longest time, growing up, I kept hearing critics and audiences praising Orson Welles' Citizen Kane as the Greatest Movie Ever Made.  Fast forward a few years, and now we've got younger generations looking for all kind s of ways to dethrone that picture from off its perch.  The reason for that is simple enough.  There's nothing inherently wrong with the Kane film as it stands.  Even its one or two technical flaws are so minor that they count as terms of retro-nostalgic endearment, more than anything else.  At the same time, it's like none of the skills and artistic mastery can ever mean that much in an age which is on the look out for, maybe it's a mistake to claim we want something "new", in the strictest sense.  A better way to phrase it is that we've reached a level of familiarity with the routine of films like Kane and are now going about in search more of "novelty", rather than any quest for originality.  In the strictest sense, there's nothing all that surprising about any of this.  It's happened before, and probably won't be the last time this sort of thing occurs in the realms of the fandom.  Films like Citizen Kane are destined to see peaks and troughs over the course of their popular reputation.  It will never go away entirely.  It's just that sometimes the desire for the novel will outweigh admiration for the sort of skills that a picture like this puts on display.  What this tells me is that our desire for the perfect image is only skin deep, it's good writing that we truly want.

All of this is very subconscious to a great extent, existing on a level that most of us will never be aware of from our first breath to the last.  I think that's the reason why films like Kane and Blair Witch still manage to hold on, despite all the critical barbs that get hurled their way.  A lot of it has less to do with the quality of the image, and those that focus on the picture quality to the exclusion of all else will always turn themselves into a historical irony sooner or later the moment public taste moves on to something else.  That's a lesson guys like Orson Welles could have told them long ago.  That just leaves the more substantial question of story quality.  When it comes to this level of criticism, things get a bit more tricksy.  There's plenty to be said about bad writing, and the lessons to be learned from it.  The catch with a format like Found Footage Horror is that we're not talking about just the ordinary bells and whistles of plotting, but also potentially raising the question of formula.  Specifically, the biggest criticism of the Recovered Horror Story is that it is too constricted by the technical limitations it places itself under.  The idea of someone creating a cinematic document of their final moments in confrontation with some sort of horrific menace (whether natural, extra-terrestrial, or Supernatural) is the base common denominator for practically all the films associated with this narrative approach.

The implicit critique of the sub-genre is that by welding itself to such a format and formula, there is little room left for anything like originality and creativity to flourish in what is effectively seen as a self-created vacuum.  The problem with this line of thinking is that it ignores the bigger picture of the Gothic genre as a whole, thus confusing and therefore losing a proper grasp of the full meanings to be had between part and whole.  To start with, if it's a question of formulas, then turning elsewhere within the field of Frights to validate your criticism of Found Footage isn't going to do anyone much good.  The reason why is because most narratives tend to be formulaic to begin with.  This is an issue that confronts every single genre out there.  It's never something you can pin the blame on just by pointing to the Horror format as if it was the sole culprit.  Indeed, to take such a course of action does little more than to paint the potential critic as something of a snob harboring a sense of favoritism toward some other type of story that you happen to like more than the one that deals primarily in fear.  For one thing, even when we look at stories set outside the realm of Found Footage, we still run into what I'm going to call the problem of narrative familiarity.  Basically, it's the fact that all Horror stories rely on little more than the Bingo game style shuffling of a few simple plot beats.  A character is thrown into a terrifying situation, and they either overcome this challenge, or else they are defeated by it.  Not much else to it.

When you strip away all the artificial trappings that have accumulated over any and all narratives that can be spoken of as belonging to the Gothic category, then all you're left with is what might be called the standard folktale setup.  It is and remains one of the simplest methods of storytelling out there.  The fact that a series of premises which date all the way back to when our ancestors had to huddle around campfires at night can somehow still capture the attention of audiences today seems to attest more to the durability and adaptability to both the Fear genre as a whole, and its Found Footage subset.  In fact, this very same adaptability factor has been in play at various points throughout the filmic subgroup's history, even dating as far back to its antecedents in Gothic literature, believe it or not.  That counts as a whole unexplored field that's still something of a mystery to both fans, detractors, and even this writer, if I'm being honest.  I hope to work my way toward all of that in future entries somewhere down the line.  For now, I'd like to take a baby step in that general direction by taking a look at one specimen of the format that, while maybe not a huge ground breaker in and of itself, is still able to display a certain amount of creativity in terms of both its visual and narrative approach to what is by now a tried and true formula.

Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons (2013).

I knew I would have to get around to her sooner or later.  It was a question of when, not if.  That's because some authors are good at casting long, and influential shadows, and that couldn't be more the case than with the author I've got to talk about here.  She's been on my radar since perhaps as far back as the late 1990s, when I first ran across a mention of her in a children's book of Horror trivia.  That's where I heard mention of a book called The Haunting of Hill House, and its author Shirley Jackson.  Come to think of it, that was the second time I ran into a mention of her, not the first.  That came from yet another trivia book.  This one devoted a two-page section to a 1963 Robert Wise film.  This time is was titled as just The Haunting.  It was one of those chance encounters, looking back on it.  One of those fortunate accidents that life is sometimes kind enough to toss your way when you aren't looking.  I didn't have a clue who Shirley Jackson was when I picked up these two references collections (one of whose title now escapes me, except for the cover art, which depicted an old mausoleum graveyard painted in shades of light, dusky purple, and blood red).  I was just a young, budding fan with a growing fascination in the kind of fiction that goes bump in the night.  It was at a point in my life which is probably familiar to veteran Horror fans.  It's that moment where it seems like you've just discovered a brand new vista opening onto a hitherto unknown world, one whose landscape is both creepy, forbidding, and somehow wonderful and enchanting by turns.

If you're a fan of this sort of genre and (perhaps to your own surprise) you mean it, then looking back I'd have to say how it's always those first, great, influential years, where you're just starting to get your feet wet by dipping your toes into dark waters, that somehow manage to retain the most importance.  That's the point in life where the sample platters from the genre's table that you allow yourself to enjoy can go a long way toward determining just what kind of a Gothic enthusiast you'll grow up to be.  In my case, everything I watched or read back then tended in the same direction.  For whatever reason, I just kept getting drawn back to the what might be called the Classics of the format.  In my case, it first started out with John Bellairs.  Books like The House with a Clock in its Walls, and Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark are what amounted to my introduction to Fear Fiction.  Bellairs was the one who introduced my impressionable young mind to the sense of the Classical Gothic quality that Horror can have at its most sophisticated pitch.  Schwartz and his partner in crime, Stephen Gammell, meanwhile were the one's who gave me my first taste for all the gory details that the genre can sometimes be pretty great at.  The Scary Stories tomes were pretty much my generation's version of the the Tales from the Crypt comic books.  It was all like discovering two halves of the same Creative Idea all at once.  It was the discovery of an entire, Weird world, and for a number of reasons, I was hooked in seconds flat.

If I had to give a reason for why it was so easy for someone like me to find a place amidst the fiction of clanking chains and screams in the darkness, then the best explanation I have is the simplest.  It's because I'd met people who seemed like they kind of understood where I was coming from.  Another way to say it is to claim I'd made some new friends who sounded like they were on the same wavelength as me.  Looking back across the passage of years, what I think I can explain now that I probably couldn't then was that what drew me to Horror must have been some level of subconscious realization that the creators of these books were coming from a place that was at least similar to my own.  You have to have to know what it's like to be scared in order to write like that.  Not just to experience fear, either, but also the frightening sense of powerlessness that comes from being just a kid stuck in a world governed by adults.  One where most of the rules are so difficult to comprehend, and it seems as if the weight of that whole, damned entire world is going to fall on you if you aren't careful.  I'm not talking about anything dire on a personal level, here.  It was never anything like that.  Instead, it's a simple matter of being just five and realizing that it's impossible to get a good night's sleep once your parents have tucked you in, and then made the dumbest choice of their lives by not even leaving you with a simple night light to keep you company, compounding it with trite words of comfort.

Does anyone else remember times like that when you were a kid?  Your parents meant well, yet they could never truly connect with what you were going through in terms of a personal fear factor.  It's disconcerting as hell, and the worst thing about that happening when you're still just a child is that it carries the implication that in terms of handling your fears, you're on your own.  When you're a kid, that's a real mind-bending realization to arrive at in such a young age.  Maybe that's why there might have been this strange yet genuine sense of comfort that came from discovering the work of artists like Schwartz, Gammell, and Bellairs.  On some level, a part of my mind understood that I was running across guys who were no more than a bunch of little kids who still knew damn well what it was like to feel that particular grain of powerlessness that comes with being a scared youngster who can't even turn to the "adults" (so-called) for help.  What made discovering the Horror genre so welcoming (as I can see now) is that it's best described as Art created by people who are, themselves, scared.  That's not meant to be a catch-all description, one person's fear could be another's enthusiasm, or else just a normal part of the wallpaper of life.  It helps to remember that subjectivity has its role to play in the phenomenon I'm talking about.  Yet writers like Bellairs and Schwartz had a knack for zeroing in on the universal fears.

Their works function as both a catalogue and exploration of the things that have both fascinated and frightened them by turns over the course of their lives.  The net result of placing these shared worries down on paper meant they were able to participate in the Horror genre's strangest, yet somehow genuine accomplishment.  They were able to carve out a safe space which, paradoxically, allowed them to examine and in some cases even confront the things that scared them.  Schwartz's now iconic use and recontextualization of world folklore, in particular, offers young readers a great means of exploring tougher themes and subject matter in a way that was surprisingly effective, considering the art style that went along with it.  This creative efficacy was made possible by the fact that one of the points of world folklore is that it is meant to function as a repository of the collective wisdom of humanity.  It's never quite the same thing as moral didacticism, yet the ability to teach a lesson to the audience can be spoken of as part of the natural bells and whistles of the format proper.  As such, it isn't until you return to stories like "Harold" later on, and realize that you've gained an early understanding of real world issues such as bullying and bigotry.  It's just one of the many reasons for why collections like the Scary Stories series have become household items on a level similar to that of the Brothers Grimm (it also doesn't hurt that Schwartz and Gammell are drawing from the same well as their earlier Romantic predecessors).  At least this is as good an explanation I've got for why I became a Horror junkie.

Learning that there are other little big kids out there who went through some of the same fears as you, and needing the format of artistic expression as means of dealing with it, can go a long way toward developing a sense of natural comradery between the writers and their audience.  It's what allowed Schwartz and Bellairs to become my first major influences as a reader.  Pretty soon, things just began to pick up the pace from there, and it didn't take me long to become acquainted with all things Gothic.  Not long after meeting the two authors described above, others soon came along to carry my interests further afield.  Thanks to the efforts of guys like Steven Spielberg and Vincent Price, I was more or less told about writers like Edgar Allan Poe.  It was an old Disney film that alerted me to the efforts of Arthur Conan Doyle, add in a dash of R.L. Stine, Jane Yolen, and Bruce Coville for the middle school years, before graduating up a grade or two to Stephen King, and you've pretty much got my education in all things American Gothic.  At the same time, it's like this is an educational process that's never stopped, really.  Even today, I can't keep from digging further up and in to the realms of Weird Fiction in the hopes of learning more about why I like to read or watch stories of things going bump in the night.  It was somewhere in the middle of all this that I made the acquaintance of Ms. Shirley Jackson.

I got to know her on a gradual level.  It started with catching just a few choice references in a couple of pop culture trivia books.  Yet I guess that must have been enough, because from there I can recall getting curious enough about the exploits of Hill House to the point where I finally bought a copy of the book.  It took a while to get into, and I recall having some difficulty maneuvering along with the kind skewed, almost schizoid narrative voice that Jackson chooses to channel her entire story through.  In fact, if I'm being honest, then the truth is (say sorry) that I needed to find a good audiobook version in order to help me understand what was going on.  With the help of the talented narration of the late and great David Warner, however, the character of Eleanor Vance and her ghostly encounters soon came to life for me in a way that didn't just make the novel intelligible at last, it also sort of made me a Jacksonian for life.  The Robert Wise adaptation is no slouch either, so as I'm concerned.  It was like going all the way back to where it started with John Bellairs, and discovering that the initial contact point where you fell in love with the genre was suddenly able to take its inaugural hints of Gothic sophistication, and somehow elevate those notes into a higher, more adult voice.  The great thing about Jackson's voice in the novel is that she is able to utilize those same notes to deliver a grand narrative.

There's a great deal to be said later on about Jackson's strengths as a literary stylist, and how she's able to make this work to her advantage, yet for now it will be enough to get to know the author herself, first.  What kind of a personality must a writer have in order to create a setting like Hill House, or the Lottery Village in the first place?  According to her most recent biographer, Ruth Franklin, "Some writers are particularly prone to mythmaking. Shirley Jackson was one of them. During her lifetime, she fascinated critics and readers by playing up her interest in magic: the biographical information on her first novel identifies her as “perhaps the only contemporary writer who is a practicing amateur witch, specializing in small-scale black magic and fortune-telling with a tarot deck.” To interviewers, she expounded on her alleged abilities, even claiming that she had used magic to break the leg of publisher Alfred A. Knopf, with whom her husband was involved in a dispute. Reviewers found those stories irresistible, extrapolating freely from her interest in witchcraft to her writing, which often takes a turn into the uncanny. “Miss Jackson writes not with a pen but a broomstick” was an oft quoted line. Roger Straus, her first publisher, would call her “a rather haunted woman.”

"Look more closely, however, and Jackson’s persona is much thornier. She was a talented, determined, ambitious writer in an era when it was still unusual for a woman to have both a family and a profession. She was a mother of four who tried to keep up the appearance of running a conventional American household, but she and her husband, the writer Stanley Edgar Hyman, were hardly typical residents of their rural Vermont town—not least because Hyman was born and raised Jewish. And she was, indeed, a serious student of the history of witchcraft and magic: not necessarily as a practical method of influencing the world around her (it’s debatable whether she actually practiced magical rituals), but as a way of embracing and channeling female power at a time when women in America often had little control over their lives. “Rather haunted” she was—in more ways than Straus, or perhaps anyone else, realized. Jackson’s brand of literary suspense is part of a vibrant and distinguished tradition that can be traced back to the American Gothic work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry James (2-3)".  This ability to tap into the Gothic tradition seems to have had a by now pretty familiar sounding point of origin.  Like a lot of the author's mentioned so far, Shirley was a scared child growing up.

Her parents were wealthy New England socialites who decided to relocate to the West Coast of San Francisco and live among the beautiful people.  It's telling that when it comes to the birth and raising of their only daughter, there remains some dispute over whether she was a wanted pregnancy or not.  "It was not", Franklin tells us, "a warm home.  Even if (Geraldine Jackson, sic) had been pleased to have motherhood thrust upon her in her first year of marriage (and by all accounts she was not), Shirley was hardly the child she had imagined. “The pregnancy was very inconvenient,” Joanne Hyman, Jackson’s elder daughter, says. Geraldine had been groomed to be a socialite...“She was a lady, Geraldine was,” Laurence Hyman remembers. And she tried valiantly to shape her daughter in her image. In one of the earliest photographs of Shirley, the little girl wears an immaculate ruffled white party dress, white shoes and socks, and a giant starched bow nearly the size of her head. But it must have been clear early on that Shirley would not conform to Geraldine’s ambitions for her. “I don’t think Geraldine was malevolent,” recalls Barry Hyman, Jackson’s youngest child. “She was just a deeply conventional woman who was horrified by the idea that her daughter was not going to be deeply conventional.” “Geraldine wanted a pretty little girl, and what she got was a lumpish redhead,” Joanne Hyman says bluntly (23-24)".

Here's where a bit of gear switching is in order.  What Franklin tends to tip-toe around, an earlier biographer such as Judy Oppenheimer chooses to tackle head-on, without mincing words.  That's why the information she passes along in the first ever Jackson biography, Private Demons, seems worth recounting here.  The way Oppenheimer tells it, "Geraldine Jackson was not a tactful woman. Years later, when Shirley was struggling to make sense of her own problems, she told her daughter Joanne a chilling story: when Shirley was an adolescent, Geraldine had informed her she was an unsuccessful abortion. It could have been the simple truth—Geraldine had a tendency to blurt things out around her daughter—or one of Shirley’s intuitive guesses, but one thing was certain. This was the way Geraldine had made her feel, throughout her life. As a beautifully turned-out woman, Geraldine, having resigned herself to maternity, expected at the very least a beautifully turned-out daughter. Fashionable, superficial, and utterly conventional—a miniature version, in fact, of Geraldine Jackson herself, who was a strong adherent of the child-as-jewelry school of parenthood. 

"The fact that the child she gave birth to—exactly nine months and one day after her wedding—turned out to be Shirley seems almost too ironic, one of those quirks of fate second-rate novelists delight in. For Shirley was odd from the start, a restless, high-strung, difficult child; brilliant, messy, torrentially creative, and far from ornamental. “You were always a willful child,’’ Geraldine snapped at her daughter forty-six years after her birth, by mail, and both the sentiment and the misspelling underlined the vast gulf that had always stretched between them. “My most basic beliefs in writing are that the identity is all-important and the word is all- powerful,” Shirley said once. Her mother had managed to malign both in one six-word sentence. A goldfish giving birth to a porpoise, as one of Shirley’s sons described it. But a tenacious goldfish, one who never stopped trying to rearrange her porpoise daughter along more acceptable goldfish lines. Perhaps with a little guile she might have had more luck, but Geraldine was never a subtle woman. Strong-willed, yes; subtle, no. Years after Shirley had left home, married, and given birth to her own children, her mother still sent her corsets in the mail, trying foolishly but persistently to rein in the overgrown creature she had somehow, unbelievably produced. 

"This was no malleable clay, however; Shirley had, as her mother soon recognized, a will surpassing her own. Even as a small child, carefully groomed, her strawberry-blond hair neatly arranged under a large bow, there was a set to the chin, a cool appraisal in the light eyes. Shirley Jackson, born to be a writer, dug her feet in and fought. Eventually she would say no to all of it, to Geraldine’s whole world of proper breeding and grooming and social minutiae, would reject forever the torch of country-club conventionality. She would laugh at it, flout it, rebel against it. But she would carry her mother within her, unexorcised for the rest of her life. Shirley’s children, especially her daughters, grew up acutely aware of the terrible resentment Shirley bore her parents, particularly her mother. “She felt Geraldine had squashed her,” her older daughter said flatly. “Crushed her spirit.”” And yet Geraldine was not a cruel woman, or even an unloving mother—simply vain, foolish, unalterably conventional. No matter how strained the relationship, it was also true that a confused, hopeless love existed between them throughout their lives, right along with the anger, pain, hatred, and lack of forgiveness.  

"Not that it helped. In fact, a complete break between these two utterly unlike women might well have been the best thing that could have happened. Instead they remained entangled for life, even though they were separated by the entire country for the last seventeen years. “Who is looking over my shoulder all the time?” Shirley mused to herself months before her death, wondering at her inability to confront certain parts of herself. It could only have been the worried, disapproving, unrelenting specter of Geraldine Jackson (14-15)".  Remember what I said earlier about encounters with moments of anxiety in childhood?  Those early experiences with an overwhelming sense of otherwise normal enough (I suppose?) fear is one of those things that can determine vital aspects of what will later become the young child's adult character.  This process seems to have ended up as no different when it comes to an author like Shirley.  As a little girl, she seems to have been prone to those same outsized experiences of a terror that seems so personal that it can sometimes be difficult to make the grown-ups around you understand just where it is you're coming from.  I was lucky in that sense.  At least I knew I had parents who care about me.  It's always possible that Shirley never had even that luxury to fall back on.  Whatever fears she might have experienced as a child, she ultimately had to face them alone.

She seems to have survived, which is good news.  Yet it's those vital moments in youth that have a way of molding the outlook that determines one's character in later years.  In that sense, perhaps Oppenheimer got it just a bit wrong.  There was a certain level of malleability in Jackson as a child, yet the crucial thing is that this is something she seems to have realized on some basement level of her mind.  Thus even if she never had much of a clear idea of whatever issues she might have been dealing with as a child, she still had the sense coupled with the necessary amount of tenacity to ensure that whatever molding process she was undergoing as she matured, it would be as much to her own welfare as she could manage.  Feel free to debate how successful she was on that score in the long run all you want.  The point for me is that at least she was able to plant some sort of personal flag for herself at the end of the day.  That's got to matter more than all the trophies you could give in a single lifetime.  The way Shirley managed to handle her own fears was via a process that seems to be a recurring pattern in writers of the Gothic.  Like a lot of kids with artistic talent, Shirl soon developed a knack for reading that quickly translated into a desire for the written word.  Here's where the vital influences came in.

According to Oppenheimer, "There were few books in the Jackson house, although there was one curious collection: (Jackson's grandmother, sic) Mimi owned the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe, which occasionally read aloud to the children (just the thing to quiet an anxious, impressionable child). But for most books, Shirley had to look outside the home; she became an early, voracious library user (23)".  This is all that space that Oppenheimer devotes to this key bit of biographical detail.  What makes this particular instance of brevity so frustrating for a reader like me is that I'll have to swear Judy passed over a crucial part in the development of the artist's mind, without giving it the proper bit of attention and analytical unpacking that it deserves.  This goes doubly so in the case of an author like Jackson, as it is within the field of Horror fiction that her greatest legacy now resides.  With this in mind, learning that one of her first encounters with the genre came through an early exposure with one of its foundational architects sounds like an essential puzzle piece that shouldn't be just mentioned in passing.  Instead, it is possible to speculate on how this exposure to the works of Poe might have both fueled and helped Jackson's own experiences with fear.  This can be shown with a bit of theoretical, yet reality based supposals.  It's possible to conjecture the effect that Poe's words might have had on her.

It is not, for instance, too great a stretch to imagine Shirley as a little girl first horrified at the tales her Grandmother tells her.  Then, perhaps to her own surprise, that initial sense of terror turns to curiosity, spurred on by nothing more than the inherent artistry contained in Poe's ornate and Arabesque style and narrative description.  From there, a process of mental and Imaginative development begins.  Shirley goes from being curious to, as Oppenheimer likes to say, "voracious".  Entertain conjecture of a portrait of the author as a young girl first begging her Grandmother to read more Poe's stories to her, and then picture Shirley mastering the complexity of the Gothic writer's ornamental prose to be able to read him like a primer.  Thus it is possible to establish a working picture of where a taste for the macabre might have all began for Shirley.  Like with many young fright fans, a lot of her later enthusiasm for the genre could have been grounded in an inherent sense of kinship between kindred souls.  In reading Poe's fiction, she might have soon begun to recognize the telltale signs of yet another fellow little kid who went through something similar to her.  She might have been able to recognize the words of a man who, even as an adult, still knew what it was like to be afraid of the dark.  In that sense, it does not seem so far-fetched to me to theorize that Shirley saw Poe first as a friend, and later as something of a mentor, and maybe even, on some level, a posthumous parental substitute for her own peripatetic household.

Even if this is all just conjecture, what isn't is the net result of early exposure to the modern Horror story at such a young age.  It's here that the commentary of scholar John Tibbets is useful in describing Jackson's ultimate achievement.  He's talking about the books of Peter Straub, yet what he has to say functions so well as a description of what Jackson is up to in her own work, that it's worth utilizing and paraphrasing them here.  Jackson's "frequent implementation in" her "stories of the works of the great 19th-century Gothic practitioners...calls for close attention".  She "not only draws upon them, but...imaginatively transforms them and gives them fresh breath, in effect. Of particular importance here are those 19th-century literary architects of what is recognized as a distinctively American Gothic, whose forms and expressions were congruent with New World attitudes and ideas. Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, and Herman Melville claim pride of place...Yet, it seems that very little criticism has explored in any detail their connections with" Shirley's "work. Clearly, there is a deeply shared kinship that borders on identity". Jackson's "stories establish" her "not just as their artistic and spiritual heir, but as their standard bearer toward a modern American Gothic (26)".  This is the basic gist of Shirley's fiction, and there's a lot more waiting to be explored.

As you might expect, it's impossible to unpack all of her artistry in the space of just a simple review.  The best this article can do is to lay down an idea of the basic foundations that undergird all of Shirley's writings.  The best description I've ever had on that score comes from the pen of Prof. John Gordon Parks.  He's best described as a now obscure commentator on Jackson's work, yet we'll have plenty of reasons to circle back to him later on in the critique.  For now, his summation of the whole point that Shirley was driving at is enough to go on.  According to Parks, "Shirley Jackson's fiction is part of the American tradition of the gothic romance or tale of terror, and her relation to such authors as Poe, Hawthorne, Henry James, and Flannery O'Connor, among others, is shown throughout the study. With these authors she shares a dark view of human nature. But through the use of gothic, terror, and the grotesque, Jackson's fiction not only explores the inner experience of contemporary life, but also suggests that the recognition and confrontation of the evil in man may be the first step in transcending it (v)".  I knew that sooner or later I would have to try and find the right entrance way that would allow for the best possible beginners discussion of an author who contains the sort of multitudes described above.  The trick is how do you manage to talk about a writer who is one of the grand architects of the Gothic genre?  Because that's who Shirley is, or at least what she has become, at the end of the day.

She is, in many ways, like the Tigris and Euphrates of the modern Horror story.  Her writings managed to turn her into one of the foundation layers for the genre's modern voice, and my biggest fear these days is that the nature of that voice, and the value it holds for the sophistication of the contemporary Gothic format is in danger of getting lost.  So that I meant I had to try and find the best possible starting point which would allow for the beginnings of an intelligible enough conversation about her words.  It took some bit of digging, yet after a quick search, I think I might have found the best place to start.  It's with an unpublished short story of domestic chills known simply as "Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons".