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Be sure to bookmark this page because in the months to come we'll be featuring classic columns from Tom Monteleone's timeless column, "The Mothers and Fathers Italian Association," which appears in every issue of Cemetery Dance magazine. If you haven't read Monteleone's non-fiction before, you're in for a treat. This is the most irreverent, entertaining, and longest-running column in the history of horror and dark fantasy, dealing with all things publishing -- Monteleone has written about breaking in, breaking out, being successful, and being a failure. He tells it like it is in the book biz, television, film, and popular culture. If you want the inside scoop on the genres you love, this is the column for you!

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March 14, 2008:

The Comic That Changed The World (Well, at least my world . . .)
by Tom Monteleone

Last issue, I questioned whether or not being typecast as a particular kind of writer is a good idea. I illustrated this concept with a few stories from my checkered past, and I must assume you enjoyed them, because here you are, queuing up for more. So what the topic this month? I'm not sure, I have a feeling this piece will take shape and assume its thematic personality only after it's been written. See, I've been thinking about what I wrote last ish-about how I became a genre writer (at first by design and later by accident), and how I slowly slipped out from under the flat rock of what's called “category'' fiction. And I'm thinking this: even though I don't want to be known solely as a horror writer, I am still happy to be able to write effective HDFS fiction, and I will always love the stuff-the good stuff.

So what's this? A retrenchment on my previous position? Hardly. More like a clarification, a refinement of the sentiments, a distillation of the stuff that fuels my spirit. After all that ranting and raving last ish, some of you may have thought I may have protested just a bit too loudly . . . Yeah, well maybe I did.

And so, a confession, of sorts. Even though I don't want to be known only as writer of horrific fiction, I do like being a horror writer.

Make sense?

Well, let me tell you a couple stories, and then maybe you'll see from whence I boogie:

Story Number One is about me (who else?) when I was just a little kid. I guess I was maybe five years old, but I could have been six.

Listen:

Down the block from our house there was a very large manse, which had been a summer home for wealthy people in the previous century, and was at the time the home of the mother of a 50s movie star named Dorothy Lamour. Not that we lived in a posh neighborhood-rather, this old place kind of stood out on our block like the hood ornament on a '38 Lasalle. The house had been built in a long ago time, before the creeping blight of tract housing had slowly surrounded its realty like kudzu Anyway, part of the property which held the house was an acre or so of trees and undergrowth we kids called “The Woods,” and the whole bunch of us used to play in its honeysuckle and poison-ivied shadows for endless hours. The leading edge of these woods, where it touched the shoulder of the street was a magical strip of verge and mud-fossils of tire tread-marks and scraps of roadside debris. Like most kids, I loved picking through the debris to find pieces of magic: fountain pens, liquor bottle miniatures, the occasional “pin-up” magazine or calendar page, and even broken or discarded toys.

So there I was one day walking along the edge of The Woods, and I found this discarded comic book that hadn't yet been beaten by the rain and fused into a hard, unreadable slab. I can't remember the title because I know I hadn't learned how to read at the time, but it was probably one of the old EC comics like Tales From The Crypt or Vault of Horror or something like that.

It doesn't matter, really, because I'll never forget the cover (and if I really wanted to do some research I could get a real comix freak to check out the title for me-in fact, if there any of you out there who really love me, you might help your Uncle Thomas, and send him the title, year, and date of the issue . . . ). Anyway, the cover was an illustration of this guy in a barber's chair. The guy had this look of abject terror on his face as he looked in the mirror at a barber looming over him with a wickedly gleaming straight-razor. All you could see of the barber was the back of his head-a bald guy with a little tonsured monk's fringe around the back and over the ears. Just this little tableau looked scary enough, but the worst part for me was an added detail: the mirror behind the guy in the chair.

Because when you looked in the mirror you could see the barber's face, only it wasn't really a face . . . it was a skull!

Yeah, a skull. Which for me was a very scary thing. It was, I think the first time, I had been made to realize that there was a skeleton underneath our skins, that everybody, even me, had a grim, scary skull under our faces. Ray Bradbury wrote a story called “Skeleton” which deals with the same self-realization, and I've often wondered if the story had its origins in a similar moment of childhood satori for Ray.

So picture the scene. A five year old Tommy, standing by the side of the road, staring at this lurid EC comics cover and being unable to move, unable to stop staring at the damned thing. Something was happening to me as I remained motionless and transfixed. Something that changed me, and made me a mutant, a dreamer. It was that very instant when I became hooked forever on things outré, bizarre, and all the stuff which lurched and shambled off the known paths of knowledge and imagination.

I mean, I was scared by this tawdry comic, truly shaken to the five-year old marrow in my bones. But, I was also attracted to it. I brought the comic home and hid it in my room, knowing instinctively that my mother would trash it if she ever saw. I wasn't so sure about my father because he loved to talk about things like ghosts and flying saucers and listening to creepy shows like Inner Sanctum and Lights Out on the radio. I sensed a kindred spirit in my father, although I wasn't certain enough at that early age to trust him yet.

So the comic stayed hidden and I would pull it out at night and look at the interior panels with a flashlight after I was supposed to be asleep. I couldn't read the stories very well, if at all, but the drawings were horrific enough-I have vivid memories of skeletal corpses clawing their way out of the ground (an overly familiar shtick in the old EC books) to exact revenge on those who killed them. Those panels surged with power, like lightning in a bottle, and I felt it tingle through me as I flipped through the pages. It was the first time I'd been made aware of mortality, of the finality and the corruption of death. I realized that I too would one day die, and the essential truth of it lay on my five-year old psyche like an anvil.

But therein lies the reason for my fascination with the literature of the darkly fantastic and the horrific-a morbid curiosity and interest in Death. The Final Door, the Dark Passage, the Grim Reaper. Whatever you want to call it, it is the common denominator of our lives; the single intrigue which no one can ultimately ignore. If this piece has any theme at all, it turns upon this simple observation. We like to read horror stories because they allow us to vicariously explore what awaits us all. Maybe we have some unspoken, unconscious hope that by stepping through the looking glass of fiction to walk for awhile upon the grim landscape of death, it may shake loose some of its mystery and power to terrify us.

Stephen King talks about this in his marvelous examination of why we like to be scared, Danse Macabre. (You've all read it, but I'm gonna rehash it anyway, anyway; and if you haven't read it, you should be ashamed of yourself.) You see, Steve offers the notion of the “shape beneath the sheet,” which refers to our need to lift the edge of the sheet which conceals what just might be a body, or a even a monster laid out on a covered slab. It is the door left ajar leading into darkness; it is the black mouth of an open cave; the heavy rag of night which hangs just beyond the glow of a campfire; the oddly configured shape which lurks in the shadowed corner of a room and simply refuses to resolve itself into anything familiar.

But there's more to it than that. I don't think it's enough to simply have an interest in death. Sure, that might be enough to attract at least once, but what is it that makes us keep staggering back for more? For us to be drawn to the tale of horror or the supernatural over and over, there must be more. There must be an enduring appeal which gets us hooked, makes us keep reading the stuff.

But that's not to say I know what it is . . .

I can only offer a few guesses and reveal what works on me, and hope that maybe we're talking about some of the same things.

When written well, horror and suspense literature evokes an emotional response from its readers. This can range from a mild sensation of unease and then across the spectrum to abject repulsion. We're talking simple scared-of-the-dark and funny-noises-at-night all the way through bugfuck fear to mind-numbing nihilist rejection. We're talking about a literature which has the ability to involve us on a visceral, as well as psychological level. We're talking about a literature that possesses and innate power to hammer out a flamenco dance on our imaginations and fire up a blowtorch under our phobias.

I don't know about you, but any writing that can do that to me is writing that's going to get my respect and attention.

The other reason I like a good horror story is strong characterization. Unlike mysteries which are heavy on plot, or science fiction which relies on startling premises or clever ideas, the tale of horror leans more in the direction of psychologically intriguing characters. From its earliest beginnings, as written by LeFanu, Poe, Bierce, de Maupassant, and the rest of the classic writers (even Melville and Kafka) the tale of horror always centered around the tormented psyche of a solitary character.

And I think that pretty much sums it up without a lot of scholarly ramadoola. We like horror stories because they make us feel things, and because they're usually about fascinating people-people like us. There's probably a third reason why we like this kind of literature, but it concerns reasons more nebulous and therefore targetable by the skeptics and the hard-asses among you. But, since I'm in a good mood today, I'll offer it up to you-along with a story to illustrate my point. (Remember, I promised you a story or two . . . well, here's Number Two)

I was 14 years old, just starting my freshman year at a Jesuit high school. It was a very traditional place, on a campus that rivaled the scope and beauty of lots of small colleges.

The main building housed a huge library defined by vaulted alcoves, polished mahogany wainscoting, 12ft. leaded windows, long reading tables with green-glass shades, and endless shelves of books. During the first week at the school, they put the entire freshman through “orientation,” wherein they get you familiar with all the shticks at the school. One of the orientation exercises was to spend a few hours wandering around the library, getting familiar with everything. It was an interesting way to get us freshman involved with the process of discovery and learning.

So, here I was, 14 years old, wearing my sport coat and tie, meandering among the alcoves and stacks and carrels of the library, reading this title and that, pulling down titles that sounded interesting, learning the locations of various categories of reference materials. One of the orientation assignments included checking out a book to read for a report, and I was eager to find something that would be a kick to read.

And here's the weird part: I'm surrounded by thousands of old books, no dust jackets on most of them, no pictures or lurid covers to catch my adolescent eye-just a lot of cloth bindings and gold-stamped spines looking very classical-and I paused as my gaze settles, most randomly it seemed, upon a title called Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Yeah that one-by Edgar Alan Poe. Now, believe it or not, I'd never heard of him. He certainly hadn't been on the reading list of St. Charles Borromeo's Elementary School, and nobody'd ever recommended him to me. And other than the comics and piles of SF and HDF paperbacks that littered my room, we didn't have many books in our house. The name “Poe” meant nothing to the tabula rasa that was my puerile mind.

And yet, I reached out and pulled the book from its niche . . . as though drawn to it by some arcane force.

I can still remember the mental jolt I received as I read down the table of contents. You know what I'm talking about: “The Black Cat,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and on and on. The story titles seemed to glow like barbed neon signs, leaping off the page to hook themselves in my imagination. I can remember thinking something like this dude sounds pretty weird-my kind of stuff . . . (well, maybe I didn't think of Poe as a dude, but then again, maybe I did . . . )

And so I checked out the book, and spent the next few nights reading into the middle of the night, lost in the dark fantasies of a brilliant, but tormented soul. It was a simple and pure joy that I haven't experienced very often in life. I'd discovered Poe. In the same serendipitous way of all great discoveries, and it was like his work was mine, and nobody else knew about him. I can remember turning my friends onto Poe and mentioning to my freshman English instructor that I happened onto this book of great short stories by a guy name Poe and asking him if he'd ever heard of the writer.

“Slightly,” said my teacher with a smile.

So what's the point of this personal, although highly fascinating, aside? Simply this: it's hard for me to accept that I pulled down that book of Poe stories totally by accident. I mean, out of tens of thousands of books I could have stumbled upon, I just happened to have selected a collection of what may be the most seminal and influential group of tales in the history of literature, and surely in the history of darkly imaginative (horror, suspense, etc.) fiction . . . ?

Yeah, sure. Somehow, I just can't buy it. And that's my other reason why I think we like to read this horror stuff-we are drawn to it by means beyond our power to understand. Some of us are mutants, you see. We want to read this stuff and a small percentage of our lot is compelled to actually write it. And as such, we beings who carry the gene for Darkness, we have an unconscious sensory power which helps us locate the good stuff and savor it the way one might sip a fine vintage in a cool cellar.

(Not very scholarly, I know, but hey, if Chizmar wanted Northrup Frye, he shouldn't have hired me for this job.)

Some of you might be thinking what's this mystical bullshit? He such an empiricist, and he's offering up this phlogiston of predestination, of fate?

Nah, not really. That last bit just sounded so good I thought I'd just throw it in.

The last point I wanted to make is that it's probably important at some point along the path to look back and take note of where you've been. Because your past is always creating your future. They say your memory is the second thing to go (I can't remember what the first is . . . ), and so you should make the effort to look back into the mist of your own time on the planet and figure out what events shaped you into the complex being you've become. These are good things to tell you grandchildren as they sit at your feet (assuming you're not talented enough to be able to write them down as I have done . . . ).

And most importantly, remember to-

Gee, kids the Mr. Clock-On-The-Wall says it's time to go! I guess we'll have to save that last thought for next issue (if I can remember it . . . ) . It's time for you to dig into the rest of this fine publication (I know you all turn to the MAFIA column first).

Later.

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Tom Monteleone has published 25 novels, the most recent of which is The Eyes of the Virgin, and more than 100 short stories. His third collection of short fiction, Fearful Symmetries, recently won the Bram Stoker Award. His omnibus collection of columns about writing, genre publishing, television, film and popular culture entitled The Mothers And Fathers Italian Association from Borderlands Press also won the Stoker for non-fiction. He is also co-editor of the award-winning anthology series of imaginative fiction, Borderlands. Recent short fiction is scheduled to appear in anthologies such as Brimstone Turnpike, Masques 5, Midnight Premiere, and Evermore. He is also the author of the very successful Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing a Novel. With his wife, Elizabeth, and daughter, Olivia, he lives in Maryland and likes it a lot. If you like or despise his work, e-mail him at tfm@borderlandspress.com