"The movie is told with style. It goes without saying that style is the most important single element in every ghost story, since without it even the most ominous events disintegrate into silliness. And “Ghost Story,” perhaps aware that if characters talk too much they disperse the tension, adopts a very economical story-telling approach. Dialogue comes in short, straightforward sentences. Background is provided without being allowed to distract from the main event. The characters are established with quick, subtle strokes". Then, he closes it all off with the simple judgment call of: "This is a good movie (ibid)". Well, for what it's worth, I took his advice, or recommendation, and gave the film a watch. Even after trying to keep as open a mind as possible, I'm afraid I'll still have to side with another critic, Bill Sheehan, who in his critical study, At the Foot of the Story Tree, described the movie version of Ghost Story, as "a marvel of missed opportunities (80)". Nor does the divergence of critical opinion end there. My own experience of reading the original novel was and remains a complete opposite.
I almost want to claim that Ebert and I must have been reading dissimilar novels by entirely different authors. So here I was faced with a challenge. How do I account for the differences of opinion between Sheehan and myself, versus those of one half of Siskel and Ebert? It was the kind of remark that didn't just get my attention, it sort of forced me to take what Ebert was saying with a certain degree of seriousness. The trouble is that doing so kind of forced me to confront a series of interrelated question. For instance, what counts as "good prose"? How does this maxim translate into "good writing"? In other words, what kind of prose makes for a "good story"? More to the point, can there ever be anything such as a perfect, indelible, and unassailable prose style when it comes to judging the quality of any given artistic work, whether a movie, or a book? I'm sure many of you reading this have already arrived at what seems to be the obvious conclusion. If you are one of these readers, then you can go ahead and skip all of what I'm about to say next. This article is not directed at any of you.
My promise (or at the very least, my hope?) is to avoid making this a boring slog by avoiding both too much technical detail, and (again, trying, anyway) to provide what I regard as various snippets and examples of what I consider to be Good Prose in the most genuine sense of the term. That being passages of narrative action and description that not only demonstrate what good writing is like, but also does something else. I tend to think the ultimate value of any good work of fiction lies in its ability to entertain its audience. This is the ultimate goal to aim for, before any other. Even if you're someone like Jon Swift or Mark Twain, and you want to bear your heart and soul in an effort to awaken your readers to the danger of racial injustice, all the good intentions in the world will turn to dust in an arena like this if you can't make a compelling narrative that grabs your audience by the throat and won't let go until the last line has been written and read. It is the story, and its ability to entertain, which is the deciding factor here. Applying it to an article like this means I'm going to have to make sure each passage from a book I might choose for demonstration is good enough to help keep the reader engaged.
The Spartan Style.
The Spartans are perhaps best described as any of those writers who belong to that particular category of composition where the prose runs to the spare and minimum of detail and expression. The best examples of this method of writing can found in those authors whose prose always tends to come out with a quick, crisp, and clear, no nonsense clarity. Another good way to describe the Spartan prose is that it's what might be termed a constant exercise in literary economy, or the preservation of detail. This style prefers the plain, straightforward statement of imaginary facts. "This is what happened", no more or less. Any good writer worth the title knows that in order to succeed as a novelist, sooner or later you've always got to go out on a limb and give the reader all the juicy details necessary for them to sink their teeth into, and make the story worth reading. The best writers in this category will deliver the goods, it's just that they are always going to do this in such a way as to conserve and compress the necessary narrative effect well within the space of just a few lines of prose. The Spartan style is the kind that tends to shun ornamentation. A good sample of what this style looks like can go as follows:
"It all began the day the world exploded. Gerald was somewhere else at the time. He wasn't anywhere near the eruption when it happened. He just had the luck to get a good front-row seat. Gerald didn't know why the world had to explode like that. He kind of liked the great big place, on the whole. It wasn't as if he asked to be where he was now, with a good view of creation being torn asunder. With the echo of the explosion ringing in his ears. He just knew that something like fate, chance, or ill will had placed him where he was now".
With any luck, that can serve as a good opening example of what the Spartan style of writing can be like. It's time now, I think, to see how actual writers use this technique in their work. Let's start out with another opening paragraph. This time, it'll come from the pages of a collection of short stories by Raymond Carver, titled, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? It's from a short piece called "Neighbors", and it's opening paragraph goes something like this. "Bill and Arlene Miller were a happy couple. But now and then they felt they alone among their circle had been passed by somehow, leaving Bill to attend to his bookkeeping duties and Arlene occupied with secretarial chores. They talked about it sometimes, mostly in comparison with the lives of their neighbors, Harriet and Jim Stone. It seemed to the Millers that the Stones lived a fuller and brighter life. The Stones were always going out for dinner, or entertaining at home, or traveling about the country somewhere in connection with Jim's work (7)'.
The way Carver demonstrated the scope of his talent and achievements in this field of literature was by learning the right balance between conservation of detail, and the inherent need of any story to tell as much of what happened as possible. The fact that he was always able to breath the semblance of life into his imaginary stage performers as they all went through the motions of everyday travails, while adhering to the strictures of the Spartan prose, says a great deal about his skills and abilities as a writer. Before moving on, we have just one other sample to look through, and here is perhaps where a bit of a pleasant surprise comes in. Rather than spoil things upfront, I'll just let the words of author David Morrell speak for themselves.
Let's get the obvious questions that everyone is asking themselves out of the way, first. No, you're not seeing things. Yes, the name everyone and their grandparent is familiar with by now really is there. Yes, it's even the real deal. And yes, for the record, Sylvester Stallone's career revival movie First Blood is, in fact, based on a book. Suffice to say, that's a discussion for another time. Our focus remains on the author's skill as a minimalist. In terms of mastery of style, it can be argued that Morrell takes a step or two further into the technical heights of the Spartan approach to literary composition. The chief way he does this is by doing little else besides trying to push against the boundaries of the form, in an effort to see how far he can stretch the format without ever breaking free of it altogether. What this means in terms of actual practice is that there's a fair bit of trickery in play with how Morrell structures his sentences. He manages to pull off what in retrospect is the textual equivalent of an optical illusion. His narrative description always manages to stay within the boundaries of the Spartan approach. However, the writer also finds ways of dragging out the length of his sentences.
The way Morrell does this is by letting the sentence run on for just as long as he needs it in order to pack in as much of a load of narrative detail as he thinks the Spartan form can hold. This results in narrative details like the following. "From eight to five he organized his force, interviewing the men already on the job, firing those who did not want to go nights to the shooting range or the state police night school, hiring men who did not mind extra duty, throwing out obsolete equipment and buying new, streamlining the cluttered operation that his predecessor had left when he died on the front steps of a heart attack (93)". All of that is nothing less than a single sentence. The sleight of hand trick comes from Morrell finding out how to make a single line of description do the work the work of six. Whereas most writers would take several sentences to tell all about how one of the book's two main leads organizes his day job, Morrell decides to take the risk of packing all of that info into just one, drawn out declarative statement. It's an interesting stylistic risk the author has taken here.
It's a credit to Morrell's skill that he appears able to have gotten away with it more or less scott-free. I can see writing instructor's like the immortal Will Strunk giving him a warning glare for it. However, I'm afraid I'll have to hand Morrell the laurels for artistic inventiveness in seeing how far he can take the format. It's his valiant little experimental excursions throughout the course of First Blood which helps to give the novice reader a sense of the Spartan style of prose writing. It is, of course, the perfect irony that the best way of demonstrating the contours of this method is to constantly try bouncing what are at least the intimations of a more expansive manner of expression against the walls of the Spartan barracks, and seeing how much stress it can take. Turns out Morrell seems to have discovered that it can bear a surprising amount of weight without breaking. I think we might have gotten as close as we can now to an understanding of the spare, classical minimalism approach to storytelling. From now on, we'll have to expand both the vocabulary and the frame in order to know the two remaining types.
The Middle Grounders.
The two best writers to exemplify the Middle Ground approach to prose composition also have a legitimate claim to being the two most famous and loved authors of both the 20th and current century. I don't think we've reached the point where either Neil Gaiman or Stephen King need much of an introduction. At least their reputations haven't slipped down into those levels of public obscurity where a reorientation of who they are and what they've written seems all that necessary just yet. Though I do worry if people are even aware anymore that a story like The Shining started out as an actual book, before it ever became a movie. Whatever the case is there, the fact that both Gaiman and King are the two most notable wordsmiths of their era makes them prime candidates for a quick study of the Middle method of writing that each of them have made famous. Here I think it'll be enough to settle on just one sample from King's work, another from Gaiman, in order to see how both writers have helped to establish what now has to be considered the de facto version of the good prose in the modern era.
We'll start off with a sample from one of King's most recent works, as I think it's overall quality marks it out as a good enough place to start. Here's how he begins the opening chapter of Fairy Tale. "I'm sure I can tell this story. I'm also sure no one will believe it. That's fine with me. Telling it will be enough. My problem - and I'm sure many writers have it, not just newbies like me - is deciding where to start. My first thought was with the shed, because that's where my adventures really began, but then I realized I would have to tell about Mr. Bowditch first, and how we became close. Only that never would have happened except for the miracle that happened to my father. A very ordinary miracle you could say, one that's happened to many thousands of men and women since 1935, but it seemed like a miracle to a kid. Only that isn't the right place, either, because I don't think my father would have needed a miracle if hadn't been for that goddamned bridge. So that's where I need to start, with the goddamned Sycamore Street bridge. And now, thinking of those things, I see a clear thread leading up through the years to Mr. Bowditch and the padlocked shed behind his ramshackle old Victorian. But a thread is easy to break. So not a thread but a chain. A strong one. And I was the kid with the shackle clamped around his wrist (1)". Here's a list of things that are going on with that opening paragraph.
In terms of the mere compositional nature of his narrative description, it's clear that King has led us into an entirely different category from the first one. We're no longer in the land of the Spartans. We've moved on to a more expansive verbal climate, one that allows the author room to stretch their legs a bit more than was possible in the previous segment. This is not to say that King is unfamiliar with narrative minimalism. Even some of the sentences in his opening paragraph above are capable of achieving a great deal of power within a limited scope. The key fact, however, is that this is not the general direction that his powers of description trend toward, or even cater to. Nor does there seem to be anything like a natural desire on the writer's part to meet such preferred requirements. King's own style is the type that always seems ready to take an almost Romantic-Utilitarian approach to its subject matter. There's a sense that the prose is willing to go however far as necessary in order to reach whatever artistic effect and/or goal that the story itself wants to achieve. In practice, this results in a style that is naturally open-ended and willing enough to accommodate the reader. This can be responsible for the often leisurely flow of most of King's novels, he's always trying to engage us.
He wants the audience to follow him along, and so his own prose has developed into the kind of style best suited for the purpose of first netting the reader, then drawing them in. King himself has a few interesting thoughts about his own techniques as a writer, and they might be worth going into later on, when it comes time to sum up the findings of this overview. For now, let's turn our attention to the prose of the creator of The Sandman. I've gone with one of the books, as opposed to any of the graphic novels, because that is the best format that will give us the best textual snapshot of Gaiman's skills in composition. I've decided on a passage from Neverwhere as it's the closest I can find to a representative text of Gaiman's skills as a novelist. The passage goes as follows.
Gaiman's the kind of author who won't skimp on the details if that's what it takes to help the narrative move along and keep the reader engaged. At the same time, there are moments when it's clear he knows when to scale it back, and let a bare bones description of the narrative events do the talking. A good example of this can be found later on in another passage from Neverwhere. It happens at a moment when the protagonist is busy making his way across a placed called Night's Bridge. "Darkness is happening,' said the leather woman, very quietly. 'Night is happening. All the nightmares that have come out when the sun goes down, since the cave times, when we huddled together in fear for safety and for warmth, are happening. Now,' she told them, 'now is the time to be afraid of the dark.' Richard knew that something was about to creep over his face. He closed his eyes: it made no difference what he saw or felt. The night was complete. It was then that the hallucinations started...He saw a figure falling towards him through the night, burning, its wings and hair on fire (110-11)".
It's the kind of moment that can only happen whenever the writer manages to make his way into whatever artistic "Zone" is necessary for the creation of good fiction. It's the most ideal place for any author to be, and nine times out of ten, it's where the best books and films tend to come from. For a devoted biblio and cinephile like myself, these are the moments I most often look forward to. I think we've begun to get at least some working knowledge of the Middle Ground style. It's the type of mode of expression that approaches the closest to the kind of everyday normal kinds of expression that contemporary human beings tend to use. Hence the reason why so many writers are spoken of as having an "easy, conversational" style. That's because its just the specific manner of diction that they are using to tell their stories. All that guys like or Gaiman are doing is using our typical, everyday colloquial speech, and then allowing it to take on the natural "heightened", dramatic quality which seems to be both regular and necessary for the de facto modes of literary-artistic expression.
In essence, the basic job of the Middle Ground style is to take real speech, and then give it an unreal twist. It's the kind of narrative strategy which is the perfect fit for the contemporary expression of the modern Fantastic genres, where the typical setup is to start the action off in the world of the everyday, before plunging the characters into situations that are, by nature, extraordinary. It is the main shared setup that unites the work of King and Gaiman. You can also find this same style being used by the vast majority of the other major to mid-list names of authors out there, as well. The folks who are able to make a sometimes more than profitable use of this Middle Ground vernacular include John Crowley, Robert Bloch, Neil Simon, Saul Bellow, Ann River Siddons, Dean Koontz, John Connelly, Joe Hill, Laurie R. King, and even Peter Straub. This constant use of a single, unified, and shared method of literary composition marks the Middle Ground out as the major writing style of the current moment. There may come a time when tastes and hence expression will cause this contemporary shared "voice" to undergo a transfiguration into another manner, yet that day seems far away as of this writing.
The Lyricists.
The final item on it, then, concerns the type of writers who, for lack of a better description, don't mind a bit of ornamentation to their prose. Perhaps now I'll have to pause for the sake of clearing another misunderstanding out of the way. When I use that word ornamentation, I'm not implying that we've entered the realm of style over substance. If that were the case, then I wouldn't even bother including this final segment as a legitimate form of storytelling. In fact, there's a sense in which it's a mistake to even describe this third prose as any kind of ornament. The writers who best exemplify the Lyrical turns of phrase are not interested in turning their books into an ongoing series of department store displays. In fact, a lot of the authors you're about to meet would be pretty darn happy to take a blowtorch to that kind of thing. It seems like we need a better word to describe the kind of Lyric prose this third category of writers specializes in. The good news is the best possible phrase seems close enough at hand. The type of authors I'm thinking of now have a knack for mixing prose with poetry.
"Dusk deepened. Mist lay behind them under the trees below, and brooded on the pale margins of the Anduin, but the sky was clear. Stars came out. The waxing moon was riding in the West, and the shadows of the rocks were black. They had come to the feet of stony hills, and their pace was slower, for the trail was no longer easy to follow. Here the highlands of the Emyn Muil ran from North to South in two long tumbled ridges. The western side of each ridge was steep and difficult, but the eastward slopes were gentler, furrowed with many gullies and narrow ravines. All night the three companions scrambled in this bony land, climbing to the crest of the first and tallest ridge, and down again into the darkness of a deep winding valley on the other side (Two Towers, Ch. 2, 210)".
Let's take a moment to notice what Tolkien has done here. For while the passage is a good example of the Lyric style, I'm not sure most people have notice the linguistic trick the author seems to have played here, one that seems to have gone over the heads of his most skilled, academic fans. The most obvious aspect of Tolkien's style is that he has somehow managed to recapture and successfully dramatize the classic, Epic voice, or mode of storytelling. All of it seems to stem from the writer's studies in ancient Classical, Latin, Northern and Anglo-Saxon literatures and mythologies. The artist has done nothing else, in the strictest sense, other than to take not just the contents, but also the original, authentic literary voices of these myths, and found a way of giving them what has sort of wound up as their prototypical modern expression. In doing so, Tolkien seems to be a living illustration of a maxim handed down by Stephen King. In his non-fiction study On Writing, King states that one of the first rules for succeeding at the word-slinging trade is: "Read a lot, and write a lot (145)". In other words, the inescapable requirement for being a good author to not just to read, but also learn how to take as many good lessons for the crafting of sentences into usable events and characters. It's the only way stories work.
Recall what I said about his stylistic achievement, however. That in finding a usable voice for the Epic, he also seems to have put this discovery to not just good, but also slightly mischievous use. In other words, there is the sense, in the passage just quoted from that Tolkien might have been using the Classical Epic style to play around with his reader's expectation of what was considered the "proper mode of literary expression". Notice the way the paragraph starts, for instance. The first and third sentences are no more than two and three words long, respectively. In these moments, Tolkien seems to have taken the Spartan approach and turned it not so much on its head as inside out, like a sock made of words which he then uses to first unravel and then stitch together into something new, fresh, and vibrant. At the same time, there's no denying that the author's voice in that passage always has one of its feet planted in the older, bardic modes of speech, while the other belongs to the modern novel. It is therefore a perfect example of an old style made new again in a way that resonates with modern readers. It's one of the great tour-de-forces of literature, and while guys like King, Gaiman, or Richard Adams are sometimes able to approach this level of writing, no one will truly achieve it ever again.
There are two samples from one of the Midwestern fantasist's books that I think do the best at showing readers of how this particular writer fits into the Lyrical camp. Each comes from his 1972 children's novel, The Halloween Tree. Here's how the first part reads. "It was a small town by a small river and a small lake in a small northern part of a Midwest state. There wasn't so much wilderness around you couldn't see the town. But on the other hand there wasn't so much town you couldn't see and feel and touch the wilderness. The town was full of trees. And dry grass and dead flowers now that autumn was here. And full of fences to walk on and sidewalks to skate on and a large ravine to tumble in and yell across (1)". Those are the exact opening lines to the book. And right from the start, we've been introduced into a different kind of secondary world. Bradbury lets us know how different the life within his pages is compared to ours by the way he structures it with his sentences. Just like Tolkien, he finds ways of taking the Spartan approach and transfiguring it into something with a Lyrical quality.
This is an aspect of Ray's work that hasn't gone unnoticed by others. I think Stephen King comes fairly close to describing the nature of Bradbury's prose, and the way it is intimately related to, and hence is able to shape the presentation of the story's contents. King was talking about another of Bradbury's works when he wrote the following in Danse Macabre, way back in 1979. However, the Waukegan fantasist's style is of such a unified whole that it pervades every single published work he ever wrote. Therefore, it is not out of bounds to describe the prose of The Halloween Tree as "darkly poetic...set in the half-real, half-mythical...a shadowy descendent from that tradition that has brought us stories about Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe, Pecos Bill, and Davy Crockett (344)". King has a very specific description of Bradbury's prose, and the literary tradition this places him into, that I find fascinating.
Each of these writers is able to stake a legitimate claim to not only writing in, but also more or less helping to create the modern Pastoral voice in U.S. fiction. All of them found ways of translating the bucolic enchantment that poets like Coleridge and Wordsworth ascribed to the English Countryside, and translated it all into an idiom suitable for the American Heartland. Their collective success in this venture meant they were able to transform the landscape of places like Walden Pond, the Great North Woods of New England, or even the Mississippi River into the kind of enchanted landscapes worthy of the best old world fairy tales. They turned America into the kind of place where even dragons and nature spirits of various stripes could find a home. They were helped in large measure by paying attention to the folklore that was already there waiting to be told. As a result, the Fantasy of the New World was allowed to have its own, distinct American voice, manners, and settings, while also carrying over themes and ideas from that of Romanticism. In fact, King's own acknowledgement of the one of Bradbury's concepts as the clash of Innocence and Experience puts him in debt to the poetry of Blake.
As such, the voice of a story like The Halloween Tree has little choice except to come off in the form of a style best described as American Romantic Pastoral. Bradbury doesn't set out to "describe" his secondary worlds. Often the finished product displays the kind of talent that wants to compose his text the way a musician would a symphony, or an Elizabethan poet would a sonnet couplet. This at least seems to be Ray's normal method of working. It's not quite the same as saying he ever did manage to achieve a prose line on the level of Hamlet's soliloquy. Yet he remains one of the greatest examples of taking modern day prose, and fusing it with a poetry of the old world, Romantic sensibility such as is found in passages describing a metaphor for the construction of the Cathedral Notre Dame of Paris.
Conclusion: In Defense of Peter Straub's Writing Style.
See the point is that every age is a victim of what is considered "The Proper Taste". The worst part is it's not anything like a fixed point that stays still so that people can tell what the standard of "Good Prose" might be. Instead, it's always more like this arbitrary fashion of the moment that some determining party decides to settle on for the sake of convenience, and above all, exclusion. Let's just say the more I study the history of literary taste, the more obvious it becomes to me that questions of genuine artistic merit have less to do with anything, so much as the age old matter of who is "In" and who is "Out" of favor. The problem with such elitism is that if it were always followed to the letter, then I'm not real sure how it doesn't manage to erase the vast majority of all the most entertaining books and films that we've enjoyed through the years. Now to his credit, this is a trap that I think critics like Ebert were able to avoid, for the most part. I'm also willing to go out on a limb and say even he might have had some aesthetic blind spots, even if he is one of the best film reviewers of all time.
Are you beginning to see what I mean by Ebert's occasional blind spots? He's got a great deal of critical acumen, and when he's hitting his stride, it allowed him to offer up some of the best insights about the world, history, and art of cinema that anyone will ever make. He kept this up at a steady pace, all except for all those other moments when his powers of insight failed him. Perhaps that's just the way it goes for everyone of us, sooner, or later. Even if this is the case, however, the fact remains that it tells less about the artwork under discussion than it does about where the aesthetic limitations of each given critic lies. Nowhere is this more obvious than when Ebert tries to tackle the work of Peter Straub. Nor is this all that surprising. If you read through Ebert's work long enough, then you begin to see that he's just not, and probably never was going to be the number one fan of Horror fiction.
I tend to see that film more as form of clever Gothic satire; a jab at the way people go about desensitizing, demoralizing (deadening, if you will) one another in pursuit of pointless and empty goals. And it is precisely that point, I would argue, which is the true engine running Romero's films, and not just the zombies. If that were the case. If all George ever offered his audiences was just gallons of fake blook poured on the screen, I doubt it would be as fondly remembered, or have as much of an enduring shelf life as it still does today. The key thing to note, however, is less the reputation of films like Dawn or Shaun of the Dead, and much more Ebert's response to all of this. Rather, it's perhaps more appropriate to note his almost constant lack of response to the cultural impact of films such as these. If Horror films like this go on to be embraced as touchstones by mainstream audiences, then the critic's relative lack of interest in such a phenomenon has to tell its own story in response.
For me, it paints this picture of Ebert as someone who was perhaps never all that much interested in the Gothic genre of American fiction to begin with. He might have liked a handful of morsels from this baroque sample plate. However, it never seems to have translated into anything like a full enthusiasm for the genre as a whole. The frustrating part about it for me, as a fan, is that he seems to make a categorical error when passing judgement on this type of fiction. The almost perfect irony about his mistake is that even here, it is possible to acknowledge he might have had at least the beginnings of a valid point. Whenever Ebert equated modern Horror films with Geek Shows, he, like everyone else, tended to point to the usual list of suspects. These would include names like Freddy, Jason, and their myriad legions of copycats, and cut-and-paste jobs. Here's the point where things get interesting (for me, at least). As long as the criticism is limited to just this particular type of film within the genre, then Ebert's judgment can be considered valid. In that sense, he's not the only one with cause to decry what might termed the cheap coarsening of a legitimate mode of dramatic Gothic expression. A lot of the reason for my liking the Horror genre is because of the heights of sophistication it can reach.
It goes double for certifiable masterpieces of the form such as Straub's Ghost Story. What I wonder about, however, is this. If Ebert's dislike of the contemporary Horror story caused him to overlook the values of films like Dawn of the Dead, or They Live, then could the same prejudice extend to the prose of Horror fiction? Could his perception of Horror as bad stories extend to a verdict of bad writing? It's with this in mind that I'm ready to present a final examination of literary style. We'll close off this study on the elements of style by looking into the sentences of Peter Straub's Horror novel.
The plan here is to quote from what I hope are the most representative examples that typify the stylistic nature of the book, with the aim of proving its literary worth. In order to do that, we'll need a basis for comparison, however. So that means it helps if we can use Roger Ebert's own opinions on what the nature of Horror fiction is, or should be. That way we have a benchmark to work with or against as the case may be. The good news is the great film critic has left with just perhaps the barest sliver criteria that allows us to gain a sense of his idea of what the Gothic should be. In the same review of the movie adaptation of Straub's novel (the one that got this whole thing started, in other words) Ebert outlines his definition of "Good Horror" as follows:
"Ghost stories should always begin as this one does, in shadows so deep that the flickering light of the dying fire barely illuminates the apprehensive faces of the listeners. They should be told in an old man's voice, dry as dust. They should be listened to by other men who are so old and so rich that we can only guess at the horrors they have seen. And, of course, ghost stories should be about things that happened long ago to young, passionate lovers who committed unspeakable crimes and have had to live forever after with the knowledge of them. If at all possible, some of the characters should be living in this life, filled with guilt, while others should be living the half-lives of the Undead, filled with hatred and revenge".
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Now, for comparison, let's take a look at how Straub himself views, or defines, the modern Gothic genre. The following are the author's own words, as recorded down in the pages of Danse Macabre: "[Ghost Story] started as a result of my having just read all the American supernatural fiction I could find," Straub says. "I reread Hawthorne and James, and went out and got all of the Lovecraft and a lot of book by his 'set' - this was because I wanted to find out what my tradition was, since I was by then pretty firmly in the field - I also read Bierce, Edith Wharton's ghost stories, and a lot of Europeans (268)". "I really wanted to expand things much more than I ever had before," Straub says. "I wanted to work on a large canvas. Salem's Lot showed me how to do this without getting lost among a lot of minor characters. Besides the large canvas, I also wanted a certain largeness of effect....I had been imbued with the notion that horror stories are best when they are ambiguous and low key and restrained. Reading [Salem's Lot], I realized that idea was self-defeating. Horror stories were best when they were big and gaudy, when the natural operative quality in them was let loose.
If you put Ebert's and Straub's statements together, then what you get is something I'm sure even the master of the "Thumbs Up - Thumbs Down" rating might appreciate. It amounts to nothin less than the kind of back and forth critical banter that Roger enjoyed with Gene Siskel during the glory years of At the Movies. This time, Straub is the one who seems to have over Siskel's role, and the contrast between each speaker's notion of what makes for good Horror couldn't be more glaring. Ebert's viewpoint is very much as Straub described it; "imbued with the notion that horror stories are best when they are ambiguous and low key and restrained". Now, to be fair, this does count as at least one legitimate method of storytelling for the Horror genre to operate in. The equal, yet obvious fact that still seems to need pointing out here, not just to Ebert but for anyone who is willing to sell the genre short, is that of course its an inevitability that the overall content of Horror, and the prose style in which it is written are bound to develop and expand the generic horizons as both time and talent evolves with the ages.
That just leaves us with the question of Straub's style as a Horror writer. How well does his prose read, anyway? The samples I aim to look at now come from the beginning and middle of the novel. Once again, each sample is chosen for the quality of the words, and how the author uses them to the best possible effect. We begin at the most logical place to start, by examining the opening lines of the book.
There are two way to look at this passage. The first concerns matters of style, the second substance, or content. Ghost Story is the kind of book that deserves its own article, however, since we're here to address Ebert's criticisms of prose writing, it'll have to wait another day. For now, we'll have to settle for talking about how the opening action is written. In terms of style, my immediate reaction to Straub's prose line, then and now, is that there's nothing all that remarkable about it. His prose is spare, sparse, and generally saves whatever small flourishes the writer might have in his repertoire for those brief moments whenever he thinks it's either allowable, or that he can get away with it. A good example of what I mean of this instance comes a few pages later, when the narration takes us once more inside the headspace of the same, nervous, maybe even dangerous driver (a child-napper?). He's on the road again after what he assumes was a close call with the authorities, and the description reads like this:
"So for hours they drove south through the songs and rhythms of country music, the stations weakening and changing, the disk jockeys swapping names and accents, the sponsors succeeding each other in a revolving list of insurance companies, toothpaste, soap, Dr. Pepper and Pepsi-Cola, acne preparations...petroleum jelly, bargain wristwatches, aluminum siding, dandruff shampoos: but the music remained the same, a vast and self-conscious story, a sort of seamless repetitious epic in which women married truckers and no-good gamblers but stood by them until they got a divorce and the men sat in bars plotting seductions and how to get back home, and they came together hot as two-dollar pistols and parted in disgust and worried about the babies. Sometimes the car wouldn't start, sometimes the TV was busted; sometimes the bars closed down and threw you out on the street, your pockets turned inside out. There was nothing that was not banal, there was no phrase that wasn't a cliche, but the child sat there satisfied and passive, dozing off to Willie Nelson and waking up to Loretta Lynn, and the man just drove, distracted by this endless soap opera of America's bottom dogs (7)".
Instead, this is the kind of story where the prose opens on that all-important note of dread, and then continues to make its slow, careful, and deliberate way toward the true Horror generating the story's ever present sense of nervous tension. In this way, Straub fashions his prose with all the careful clarity of an onion being peeled back in the hands of a master chef. He doesn't shout as much in this book because he knows he doesn't have to. The nature of the Horror at the center of his narrative is of such a quality that all he has to do is stand back, and let it generate its own, classic aura of Gothic fear.
In fact, it is possible for Straub to modify the tone of his writing based on the situation he finds himself confronted with. Let's take a good example of this from the book's second opening, in it's Part Two segment. After spending the entirety of the opening in a state of slow, yet steady building tension, confined for the most part to the inside of that car with the runaway driver and the girl he seems to have kidnapped, everything build to a crescendo I will not spoil here. After that, the prose reads as follows:
"One day in early October Frederick Hawthorne, a seventy year old lawyer who had lost very little to the years, left his house on Melrose Avenue in Milburn, New York, to walk across town to his offices on Wheat row just beside the square. The temperature was a little colder than Milburn expected so early in its autumn, but Ricky wore his winter uniform of tweed topcoat, cashmere muffler, and gray, no-nonsense hat. He walked a little briskly down Melrose Avenue to warm up his blood, moving beneath huge oaks and smaller maples already colored heart-wrenching shades of orange and red - another seasonal touch. He was susceptible to colds, and if the temperature dropped another five degrees, he'd have to drive...What he walked chiefly to observe was Milburn itself - Milburn, the town in which all of his life except for his time in university, law school and the army had been spent. He had never wanted to live anywhere else, though in the early days of his marriage, his lovely and restless wife had often claimed the town was boring. Stella had wanted New York - had wanted it resolutely.
In the space between these two scenes, Straub has managed to shift the tone from that of American Bucolic back to the realm of the kind of haunted woods that lie in wait for unwary travelers in a dark fairy tale. This is an initial impression that gets driven home over the course of the novel to Lewis Benedict, the unlucky jogger from the passage above. Later on, nearing the end of the story's middle, he is once more visited by the impression that the otherwise ordinary forest pathway up to his own front door has changed, and that he has somehow wandered into the pages of a text, instead of real life. "And now, walking over new snow toward his woods, Lewis had a fresh perception. It may have come because he was seeing the woods from an unfamiliar angle, going at them backward, and it may have been because he was just walking through them for the first time in weeks, not jogging. Whatever the reason, the woods looked like an illustration in a book - not like a real woods, but a drawing on a page. It was a fairytale woods, looking too perfect, too composed - drawn in black ink - to be real. Even the path, winding off in a pretty indirection, was a fairytale path (160)".
Now these passages within Straub's novel fascinate me for a number of interconnected reasons, and the best way to start the explanation of this goes as follows. As a scholar, J.R.R. Tolkien lived by an idea or rule that might sound either preposterous, or interesting: all language has a history. A correlative of this notion is that sometimes, if you study the use of language in a culture's history, then sometimes you might get lucky enough to spot what might be termed moments of linguistic transition in action. Those periods where it becomes easy to tell that the common artistic terms and expressions of a culture's vocabulary and vernacular are undergoing a shift from one voice to that of another. Call it an overlooked facet of human evolution, one so natural that most of us can't even pick up on when it happens, or has occurred, even the recent past. The switchover from the language of an analog state of living to the digitally infused manners of speech in our own era is the best current example of this evolution. When I read Ghost Story now, I think I begin to see signs of another shift taking place, right within the very pages of the book itself. Straub's novel is a product not just of that earlier analog terminology, it also seems to have become a kind of accidental, linguistic artifact. The snapshot of a moment of transition from one form of artistic expression into another preserved forever in the pages.
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Go back and read short stories like "A Good Man is Hard to Find", or The Haunting of Hill House, sometime. If you do, you're bound to be shocked by the strange familiarity hanging over the proceedings. That's because what the reader is witnessing as they pour over the words is nothing less than a slow series of building blocks that have wound up leading now inexorably to the modern Middle Ground idiom employed by the likes of Straub, King, and Gaiman in their own experiments with the Fantastic genres. The writing of O'Connor and Jackson form inescapable stepping stones to novels like Salem's Lot or Ghost Story. The key thing to note, however, is the way that earlier writers like Jackson used the vocabulary of the mid-20th century Gothic to construct her haunted secondary worlds. A setting like Hill House is made up of words that are clean, crisp, and clear. Jackson then takes that clarity of style, and twists it until we are firmly in the land of unreliable narration. She does this by giving the vast majority of the novel over to a main character who may be haunted by spirits, or else just going insane, with the most likely answer being a little of both columns. It's one of the great tour de forces not just of Horror fiction, but of Western literature in general. It's the genre at a high peak.
If this is the case, if there's any probability to the kind of surmise laid out here. Then all we're left with is a sense of irony. We've got a writer with a great deal of talent and stylistic ingenuity confronted by a critic who seems more or less locked into his tastes, which are set in stone. You begin to get the sense that Horror fiction, for Roger Ebert, was always going to be limited to the more classical approaches of writers like Shirley Jackson and Henry James. In other words, the genre moved on, and Straub was one one of the artists who helped usher it into our modern terminology, leaving the tastes of guys like Ebert behind. If that's true, then the upshot is that Ebert didn't seem to mind being left behind. He was pretty much okay with being regarded as something of an old fossil even while he was still coming into his own. The final tally, then, is that while Ebert may have a lot to say about the efforts of other artists. In the end, he just doesn't seem to have been the best possible reader of a novel like Ghost Story.
A lot of the reason for this affection seems to stem from the author's awareness that he has stumbled upon the perfect set of literary archetypes that more or less represent that older, classic style of ghost story teller. The Chowder Society, in other words, are the perfect homage to writers like Henry James, Nathanial Hawthorne, M.R. James, and Shirley Jackson. They seem to epitomize for Straub all the glory of the older Horror stories, and he can't disguise his genuine fan's enthusiasm for what they represent. Hence the strange note of respect that always hangs over most of their scenes. Even when things are dour and threatening, you can tell the writer's heart goes out to these characters. The biggest way he demonstrates this affection is by giving them a story that functions essentially as a passing of the torch. The Chowder Society more or less wind up bequeathing their legacy to another character, a young man who is representative of the newer breed of Horror authors that both Straub and King belong to and wound up as. In that sense, the whole story is meant as a narrative of transition.
The whole point of this essay was two-fold. I wanted to tackle the words of a former critic, in order to see if they were sustainable, or not. While I haven't lost any respect for the talent of a reviewer like Roger Ebert, I have come away with a better sense of his overall aesthetic values, and hence, how this outlook determines his many strengths, as well as his potential weaknesses. Some types of narrative were just forever out of his sympathy and Ghost Story turned out to be one of them. Still, it is merely a sketching in of the limits of the critic, and not of the literary skills of the novel proper. This in turn led me to the other point of this article. It was necessary to give as good an overview as possible of the types of modern prose that exemplify the modern idiom of artistic expression. I think I've done a good beginner's job of that, if nothing else. It is possible to prove that Straub's own narrative voice is well in keeping with the best types of writing available today. The only ambivalent question remains Ebert's own tastes with regard to what has to be termed the typical modern style of telling stories. The final thing to be determined is which of all the writing styles I have listed deserves to be first among others?
The answer to that question is easy? There is no proper way for one style of writing to be better than another. To try and claim otherwise is little else but an act of hubris bordering on egotism. If literature is ever to do its job in a proper fashion, then all the possible styles of telling a story must be considered as all on the table, and up for grabs. Otherwise, the proper Art of writing a good work of fiction will stagnate. This is something I for one don't feel like allowing. Everybody's got to find and have their own voice, and that means both the allowance for mistakes, as well as the ability to learn from the possibilities of new developments in literary style. It's a lesson I think Ebert was well aware of, and yet he'd just reached a point where it was no longer possible to teach an old dog new tricks. My only hope in all this is that it doesn't become an inevitability with everyone sooner or later. The realm of Creative Writing is one of the places where I find myself the most at home, for some reason. Nor am I the only one. I think it's our job as literary enthusiasts to do the best we can to make others feel welcome.
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