UNDER THE DOME!!! :D

I have spent this week enjoying Stephen King's latest opus, Under the Dome, and I am SO loving it!!! It's HUGE, too! 34+ hours of audiobook listening. But the vastness and complexity of the story is part of what makes it amazing!

It's crazy, I was in the middle of Furies of Calderon (audiobook) and about 1/4 into Seeking Spirits (hard copy), AND after this past Saturday's investigation Mike loaned me Collison Course by William Shatner and John loaned me the Starhunter box set. So it's not like I was looking for entertainment, lol. If anything, I was budgeting my time to get through this embarrassment of riches.

But then I'm in Walmart, shopping (essentials) and I see that King has a new blockbuster out, and it looked COOL! A small northeastern town finds itself TRAPPED UNDER AN INVISIBLE DOME!!! :D

I mean, in the hands of just about any author besides King, Koonts, Crichton or Adams I probably would have scoffed and forgotten about it. But I've read enough of King's work to know that he can make the silliest of notions work! (He somehow finds the reality of the most unreal situations, and forces you to invest your emotions into the characters trapped in that circumstance.)

And as I'm listening to this, I'm struck by what genius horror writers King and Koontz are!

If you study the horror genre long enough, you will find that one of the psychological tricks horror writers use is to have characters enjoy the Darkness... If you want to create a human monster, you have that character do horrible things, and enjoy doing it. For some reason, it's really, really creepy to watch a person enjoying doing something that you have difficulty imagining real people doing.

When this is done poorly, you get sexy vampires who always smile coyly when the kill their victims, or evil geniuses who laugh ominously when they reveal their evil plans.

But when this is done well, you get the creeps whenever that character is in the chapter or on the screen.

Then, if the horror writer is particularly ambitious, he/she might have one of the main characters enjoying doing some dark deed. There is a literary theory that horror stories are about breaking down people so that they are, themselves, almost monsters. (Some folks swear by this, but I believe it's merely one of several approaches to writing an effective horror storie.) So, maybe, in the climactic battle, you might have the hero not only dismantle the monster, but really get into it, like in a sick way. (Think about the ending of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter when Corey Feldman's character hacks up Jason, killing him, then can't stop hacking. His sister pulls him away and hugs him to her, but the camera reveals his expression: His bloodlust is still up, and he may have been permanently altered by this experience.)

But what I've noticed King doing in this book (and Koontz in some of his work; and more besides these two, I'm sure, but I'm not really widely read (I like who I like and I generally stick with them)) is a bit more insidious -- and may be a contributing factor to why these novels are so effective: King makes you, the reader, enjoy the Darkness!

Here's what I mean: King creates characters who are so... inhuman that you really, really want to see them killed! You want to see them tortured and tormented in the most excrutiating ways possible!

I've never really noticed this before.

King makes me hate these characters. He makes me want to watch them die. (And, I suspect, I'm not the only one to react this way.)

Since I was a kid, I've always gotten of when the really, really bad man is stopped by the really, really good guy -- usually mortally. But because a staple of the horror genre is gore, when the bad guys die, they die bloody!

You expect it.

You're disappointed if you don't get it.

One of the best novels I've ever read is a Koontz novel (the name of which I won't reveal here for reasons that will be obvious in 2 seconds) and it contains one of the most frightening human monsters of all time (on par with Hannibal Lector, or Hitler) and his ultimate end... left me unfulfilled.

Which is sort of ironic (if I'm using the word correctly here) because the point of the novel is the power of people loving and looking out for one another. I hated any chapter that featured this character because the warped way he thought and acted made me feel like I needed a shower every time he took the page, whereas I adored every paragraph and sentence with any of the myriad other characters in the book! I loved these character because they were good people getting along the best they could in unfairly difficult circumstances, helping each other out along the way.

But then when the "monster" is removed from the picture (which is, basically, what you're waiting for from the start of the novel) in a fairly tidy manner, I feel a little cheated because he didn't die horribly enough.

How warped is that?!!

And earlier in life, I didn't find anything wrong with my emotional reactions -- wanting the bad guys to die horribly -- because these were fictitious characters, these were "people" who had never lived, except in imagination. And that was good enough for me.

But these past years my intention -- the desire behind my thoughts, feelings and actions -- has become important to me, and monitoring my intentions has become an ongoing practice of mine.

And it has been quite an interesting revelation to observe the intricacy of the craft behind a master writer's work! I didn't notice it in the last 2 King novels I read -- Duma Key (AWESOME!!!) and From a Buick 8 because the "bad guys" were supernatural. I don't actually feel a desire to seek out sick, twisted retribution against a vicious hurricane that ravages hundreds or thousands of victims, even though my deepest sympathy and empathy is with them.

So it was quite interesting, and not a little disturbing, to notice how quickly and thoroughly I desire the blood of an evil character. (And I tend to imagine myself to be so "enlightened"! Tisk, tisk!)

And I'm not certain, but I think the way I discovered King's skillful use of this "enjoying the Darkness" (that's not, like, an official term for this literary device, just one I'm calling it for now) tool is because he also used a simple, wide-spread literary tool when he finally killed off a couple of minor monsters in this book I'm reading now:

He made me empathize with the monsters.

Movies are a bit simplistic with the application of literary tools, because they're looking for the biggest bang for their buck, if you will. Finding out that the shark in Jaws II is the mother of the other shark (if I'm remembering this correctly, and not confusing it with another Jaws movie) gives the monster motivation, but you don't empathize with it. On the other hand, whatever version of Frankenstein you watch, you totally empathize with Frankenstein's creation, but you're not likely to be frightened of it.

Novels are a great deal more complex.

In this one (and this is just a teeny-tiny shard of the story, barely even a sub-plot, really, in the scope of this huge story) King creates these 2 human monsters, who are monsters for the duration of their literary lives... until they die. Then, with just a few words, you sort of feel bad for their fate, despite the inhuman things they have done to earn their end.

Shakespeare was right: "What a piece of work is man..."

I had no idea I was particularly complex! And yet, here I am lusting after a "person's" blood when I never would have imagined it possible! (Regardless of whether or not the "person" is real, it's my intention that interests me in this particular matter.)

Also -- and perhaps this is my original point in writing this entry -- HOW BADASS IS STEPHEN KING?!! :D