Week Five: 30 Days of Night

 

This week we’re back to vampires, courtesy of Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith in the graphic novel 30 Days of Night.

I remember when the movie came out back in 2007, and all the girls were excited about seeing Josh Hartnett. My friends who saw it because they didn’t care about Hartnett and wanted to see the movie for its own merit all said the same thing: it wasn’t good.

 

Sorry, Josh, but at least you're pretty.

I knew it was based on a graphic novel, but I’ve never been a big reader of comics and forgot about it until finding out I had to read it for class. I wasn’t sure what to think because of what I’d heard of the movie, but no matter whether the novel was better than the movie, I knew the vampires wouldn’t sparkle. They’d be monsters instead of brooding heartthrobs.

A huge factor in the monster endeavor was the setting. The story takes place in Barrow, Alaska, where temperatures are on average below zero and the area is plunged into a thirty day stretch when the sun doesn’t rise. The setting immediately made me uncomfortable. I hate being cold. I only have so many blankets and my heater only works so well. I hate snow. The first snow of the season is pretty, but afterwards it’s annoying with its need to be cleared. I hate winters in the Northeast. They’re cold, gray, and dark. The sun sets around 4 p.m., and I always wish I could hibernate until spring. So reading about these freezing, dark days in Barrow, Alaska made me cringe.

Because of these thirty days of darkness, vampires can roam freely and feed. They massacre Barrow, and they don’t look good doing it. Now while a part of me misses a monstrous vampire, I admit to enjoying a well-written sexy vampire (that doesn’t sparkle). But I’m not reading a book with those kinds of vampires to be scared or even made a little uneasy.

Niles vamps are creepy, with rows of pointed teeth, long claws, and black eyes. Even their text bubbles are ragged and aesthetically unpleasing, just like the monsters saying the words are. They’re out to satiate their bloodlust, and the splashes of red from their kills mark many of the pages. Unlike the vamps in I Am Legend, Niles vampires are active. Rather than lurk quietly in the background while the hero works out a solution to end them like the I Am Legend vampires, the 30 Days of Night vampires are just around the corner waiting to feed. And it’s pitch black out. And it’s below zero. Oh, and all forms of communication to the outside world have been cut off. Also, no weapon can kill them—only vampires can kill vampires.

Once the hero of the story, Eben, figures this out, he freely chooses to become a vampire so he can kill the big bad head vampire who has come to Barrow to cover up the killing spree so the media doesn’t get wind that vampires exist. Eben driving force isn’t just to protect the town, but to protect his wife’s Stella. Again, the theme of the power of women creeps into the readings. Eben acts out of love and protectiveness when he elects to turn vampire, and just like in I Am Legend, Breeding Ground, and “Rawhead Rex,” the influence of women is key to keeping the story moving.

Stella points out after the fact that the sun was about to rise in a day or so. I couldn’t help but wonder if the remaining townspeople couldn’t ride out the killing spree another day, then they’d have about nine months to focus on an alternative plan to kill vampires should the monsters come back.

Wonderings aside, Eben’s killing of the alpha I found hard to believe. I’ve read books were young vampires are stronger than the old ones, but I never fully bought it. It makes more sense to me that the older vampires would have the upper hand because they’d had more time to hone their skills. Maybe I’m supposed to extend my disbelief that Eben is able to kill the alpha because he’s a sheriff.

Up until that point, I was completely with Niles and his vampires. I found them warped and fascinating, and I wanted to read more up until the end when Eben punched the head vampire through the face. But I can almost overlook this because these vampires worked so well in the classic bloodthirsty way. If nothing else, I have one more reason to stay inside this winter.

Week Four: "Rawhead Rex"

The reading for this week is spider-free, which is a plus for me because I haven’t been able to look at the spider that lives outside my window the same since reading Breeding Ground (fun fact, I've name said spider Sarah Pinborough). While the setting of this week’s story keeps me in small-town England, Clive Barker's short story Rawhead Rex deals with baby-eating giants rather than nightmare-inducing beasties.   

And Rawhead Rex was the first monster I've truly liked this term.

Rex was the first monster who was wholly present throughout the entire story. He didn't remain passively in the background the way the vampires did in I Am Legend or the Widows in Breeding Ground. I feel like the potential both monsters had was wasted, especially the Widows. Both are explained, they’re terrifying, but then they don’t do anything. Neville is too busy with his science and Matt is too busy with his women to really pay attention to the monsters in their lives.

But Rex demands to be remembered. He’s Barker's take on the Boogeyman, the monster that's under the bed or in the shadows waiting to eat small children. Some might know him as Bloody Bones, others might view him as a symbol for the Devil. Either way, he’s been lurking in minds for centuries.

The story opens with Thomas Garrow clearing a plot of land for farming. The land hasn't been touched in years, and Garrow doesn't know why. He just wants to plant some hops, or maybe a nice orchard, but there’s a giant slab of rock in the middle of the field that has to be moved before he can plant anything. Garrow manages to dislodge the rock, and inadvertently frees the boogeyman. Enter Rawhead Rex, all nine-feet of him. Rex crawls out of his prison-grave where he’s been trapped since the Middle Ages and is hungry for some children.

From his first appearance, I read Rex as having a rock star vibe. He’s called “The King” throughout the piece--rex is Latin for king. He takes what he wants when he wants it, and he gets a kick out of doing it. Before he was trapped underground, he and his brothers owned the earth, which indicates that Rex is something primordial. “Just because [the people] had tamed the wilderness for a while didn't mean they owned the earth. It was his, and nobody would take it from him” (Books of Blood: Volumes One to Three, 371). He even has a modern-day minion in Declan Ewan, the town Verger who finds pleasure in letting Rex piss on him. (If that's not twisted devotion, I don't know what is.)

Rex is also the most concretely described monster so far this term. Aside from his physical appearance, the explanation of his origin is peppered throughout the story. Barker gives just enough of Rex’s back story to satisfy the reader. What I needed to know is how or if Rex could be destroyed. And just like every good monster, Rex has his Kryptonite: fertile women. Not improbable science that has to make up its own rules to explain itself.

When Rex goes on his first killing spree, he doesn't kill the menstruating Gwen because her monthly blood disgusts him. He's killed by a statue of a fertile woman. “To him the stone was the thing he feared most: the bleeding woman, her gaping hole eating seed and spitting children. It was life, that hole, that woman, it was endless fecundity. It terrified him” (406). His fear slows him down enough that the villagers overpower him and bash in his skull with the statue.

Rex’s fear is primal. Even though only women can carry and birth the children he desperately craves, they have the power of life which contradicts his power of death. Rex is almost a caricature of maleness, from his huge size to his strength to him marking his minion with urine. He lives to kill the innocent, while women are designed to give life to the innocent. Rex took his revenge on women in the Middle Ages by raping them—he knew they couldn't survive the pregnancy because they were physically incapable of carrying his children to term. Yet no matter how much he hates women, he can't survive in a world without them. He might physically overpower them for a time, but ultimately women overpower him because they produce life while all he can do is end life. Even when he created life by impregnating women, he knew neither the women nor his children would survive.

Gynophobia, anyone? There's something great about the monster who only desires to be feared having a fear itself.

I can forgive Barker the constant head-hopping because he created a monster I can understand, partially because I've been familiar with the idea of the boogeyman all my life and partially because his fear of feminine isn't so far reaching that it falls short of suspending my disbelief. Rex is big and bad—he always has been and he always will be. He's violent and dangerous, and Barker doesn't coddle the reader from this. He's what every monster should be: something worth fearing.

Works Cited

Barker, Clive. "Rawhead Rex." 1984. Books of Blood: Vols 1-3. New York: Berkley, 1998. 362-407. Print.

Week Three: Breeding Ground

I don't scare easily, but I do have a list of things that terrify me. Relatively high on that list is spiders. It was only after being trapped in a car with one, almost swerving into oncoming traffic, and making pathetic, animal-like whimpers that made me realize my fear of spiders might be more akin to a phobia.

Far lower on my list of fears are pregnancy and giving birth. So many women say it’s wonderful experiencing the miracle of life. Maybe it’s because I watched my mother have a rough time being pregnant, maybe I’ve seen too many episodes of Call the Midwife, but I’m not anxious to conceive and carry a child to term. I find the entire business of being pregnant and giving birth unsettling.

So what does Sarah Pinborough do in her novel Breeding Ground? Combine two of my fears into one convenient package: women become pregnant with mutant spiders which then rip free from the living women’s body.

What fun.

The first third of the book made me uncomfortable. The symptoms of the freak-spider pregnancies are wonderfully disgusting and so very disturbing if you fear both spiders and pregnancies. I haven’t read much that’s truly grossed me out the way Breeding Ground did. Other than that, though, I have major problems with this book.

First is with the treatment of women throughout the story. This surprised me coming from a woman author. All the female characters are flat and one-dimensional. Chloe, the first female character the reader meets, serves one purpose: to host to a parasitic mutant spider, or Widows as they’re called. The narrator Matt, Chloe’s boyfriend, tells the reader that she used to be a lovely girl. Yet all the reader really sees of Chloe is her complaining about how much weight she’s gained before the spider takes over her brain and gives her telepathy and the ability to physically immobilize Matt.

This is the same pattern with most of the female characters throughout the book. At first I thought it was Pinborough’s way of illustrating how women are merely incubators for the Widows and serve no other purpose to them. Yet there are three female characters who aren't immediately living incubators: Katie, Jane, and Rebecca. But they’re not given much personality either.

Jane is a child, and besides showing how the mutant spider pandemic has warped the mind of a male survivor Nigel and being eaten by a Widow, she doesn't do much. She more or less just takes up space on the page. Her older sister Katie also doesn't serve much purpose than to be Matt’s new fling. She becomes impregnated with one a Widow and chooses to kill herself rather than be eaten from the inside out. Finally, there’s Rebecca. She’s deaf, and since she’s deaf her blood is like acid to the Widows (more on that later). She’s another one of Matt’s flings.

Which brings me to my next issue: Matt. I found him to be more of a pig than Robert Neville from I Am Legend. Matt tells the reader in the prologue that the events of his story happened last year. In this time, Matt begins with his girlfriend Chloe. He’s happily living with her and awaiting the birth of their first child when the book opens. She’s taken over and eaten by Widows, but Matt doesn't stay long enough to see her death. He doesn't seem too remorseful—the entire time Chloe’s been pregnant, he’s been disgusted by the weight she’s gained.

Matt leaves town and meets up with other surviving men, all of whom have lost the women in their lives to the Widow pandemic. Two surviving and Widow-free females join the group, Katie and her little sister Jane. From the moment Katie joins the group, Matt is sexually attracted to her. They consummate their relationship, because what’s an apocalypse without sex? Matt acknowledges that he and Katie start their relationship pretty soon after Chloe, but it’s a purely sexual relationship. I understand that grief manifests in many ways, including the all-consuming need to be as close to another person as possible. But Matt’s justification of his relationship with Katie so soon after Chloe makes him seem sex-obsessed. In fact, Chloe pretty much drifts off to the back of Matt’s mind rather quickly after he leaves her.

Not long after Matt and Katie have sex, Katie becomes pregnant with a Widow, but doesn't live long enough to let it kill her. About thirty pages later, Matt is sleeping with Rebecca. She too becomes pregnant. But because her blood is acidic to the Widows, there’s hope that her baby is actually a baby and not a Widow. In less than a year, Matt has gotten three different women pregnant.

I feel like other things should be in the forefront of the mind during an apocalypse instead of sex, but that’s just me.

Which brings me to my final gripe with this novel: Pinborough’s explanation of the origin of the Widows. For some reason, I thought the widows were aliens. I was completely wrong about that, they’re the result of genetically spliced food and animal genes….

Wait, what?

I must have read the explanation about five times to make sure I didn’t misunderstand. Pinborough’s explanation for the Widows was genetic experiments gone wrong, and these experiments carried away on the breeze….

I like my original alien spider theory.

For a while, I was convinced Matt was some kind of Widow carrier. After all, two of the three girls he impregnated conceived Widows along with babies. How men became carriers of the male Widows was never explained, and neither was why the blood of deaf Rebecca and a deaf dog were toxic to the spiders. I feel like Pinborough either needed to explain her monsters better or not explain them at all and leave them completely shrouded in mystery. The rushed, incomplete explanation Pinborough used felt like a cop out. I felt gypped, like Pinborough ran out of steam and just slapped an ending together, which is extremely frustrating after dedicating the time to read any book.

I wanted a better apocalypse, spiders or not.

(Preferably not.)

Week Two: "The Funeral"

www.calebwilde.com

On to week two, but we're not done with Richard Matheson just yet, folks! This week the text in question is the short story “The Funeral.” At an easy to handle ten pages (in my Tor second addition mass market paperback), I read it more than once for this class.

Why? Because it’s a delight.

While I Am Legend was, in my humble opinion, a decent and thought-provoking novel, I wouldn't use the adjective delightful to describe it. Once the reader works through all of Robert Neville's issues of alcoholism, potential insanity, and the struggle to keep it in his pants, what's left is the theme of isolation and the crux of the story: Neville was the monster the entire time, not the vampires.

Not exactly a list that gives me the warm-and-fuzzies.

Even though "The Funeral" deals with the theme of death, it makes light of it, which I find refreshing.  Part of how Matheson does this is through tiny, but amusing, details. The best example is the funeral director, Morton Silkline. Matheson did a wonderful job telling the reader about his character without info dumping. And in Silkline’s case, there's everything to a name.

Those who know a little French might recognize "mort" as the word for "death." The first dictionary definition of mort is "a note sounded on a hunting horn when a deer is killed"; the second is "a great quantity or number." It's no secret that Silkline is a greedy man from how he reacts to a customer requesting the most expensive funeral furnishings. Even the name Silkline evokes the image of the silken lining of a casket. Silkline's name is the only one that has this many layers to it, but it's the first one (and the first words of the story for that matter) given to the reader. It fits his role in the story and is undoubtedly the most memorable of all the names.

Shortly after being introduced to Silkline, the reader meets Ludwig Asper, the first of the many monsters to make an appearance. Asper was turned into a vampire and never had a proper funeral. Silkline doesn't realize that his client isn't human until Asper explains that these funeral arrangements are for him. Yet rather than run away screaming, Silkline arranges the funeral—not because he is exceptionally brave, he faints after seeing Asper turn into a bat, but because he is exceptionally greedy.

All hail Silkline's character flaw, because without it there would be no story.

The big day of the funeral arrives, and so does Asper's friends—a motley array of the most easily recognizable monsters in modern culture. There are several vampires, a werewolf, a witch and her cat, and a small waxy-skinned man who has a taste for flesh.

Even Silkline takes on a monstrous description after the guests arrive. He becomes "zombie-stiff" with fear.

It is these monsters that drive the story forward. Nothing much happens plot-wise in "The Funeral." The monsters trash Silkline's funeral parlor during the service, Asper leaves Silkline the money and a note of apology for his friends, a tentacle monster arrives to arrange a funeral on the recommendation of Asper, and Silkline doesn't turn the creature away despite his fear. Yet Matheson makes his monsters so wacky and interesting that I wanted to read more. I loved that a vampire wanted to attend his own funeral, and he invited all the best… people to attend. Matheson gave them personalities and gave them a human twist. They're not just blood-thirsty monsters intent on killing, they care about their friend enough to attend his funeral. They tease each other, praise Asper on his fine taste in his choice of coffin, and the witch tries to make a move on Silkline (which I thought was hilarious). Even the Count who gives the sermon tries to sound impressive with his extensive vocabulary, which is something so typically human I have to laugh.

Funerals are notoriously somber affairs, from the planning to the ceremony. Yet by spinning something familiar on its head and making it a parody of itself gives new life to it. Pun intended.

Now I want to attend a vampire’s funeral….

www.crapthatwillblowyourminds.com