Monday, December 26, 2016

The Great God Pan (1890)

by Arthur Machen

Halfway through Arthur Machen’s Victorian horror story “The Great God Pan” one of the characters has this to say about the things he has experienced:

          Villiers mused curiously over the story he had heard, and wondered
          whether he had heard both the first and the last of it. “No,” he thought,
          “certainly not the last, probably only the beginning. A case like this is
          like a nest of Chinese boxes; you open one after the other and find a
          quainter workmanship in every box. Most likely poor Herbert is merely
          one of the outside boxes; there are stranger ones to follow.”

This is essentially the conceit of a truly fascinating story whose only modern parallel seems to be Ghost Story by Peter Straub. It’s a series of seemingly unrelated chapters that halfway through begin to coalesce around a particular woman described in this way: “Everyone who saw her at the police court said she was at once the most beautiful woman and the most repulsive they had ever set eyes on. I have spoken to a man who saw her, and I assure you he positively shuddered as he tried to describe the woman, but he couldn’t tell why. She seems to have been a sort of enigma.” The woman also seems to be the cause of death and carnage wherever she goes, and yet is as elusive as a ghost.

The story opens on the observations of a Mr. Clarke who is in the process of witnessing an operation to be performed by a Dr. Raymond. But this is not a medically sanctioned procedure. Raymond believes he has uncovered the secret to the existence of other dimensions that the human mind cannot comprehend in its present state. “You may think this all strange nonsense; it may be strange, but it is true, and the ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the great god Pan.” By altering the brain slightly he believes that he can allow humans to experience these other dimensions. “The present day men of science are unable to account for the presence, or to specify the functions of a certain group of nerve-cells in the brain . . . I can set free the current, with a touch I can complete the communication between this world of sense and a spirit-world.” The subject for this experiment is an orphan girl named Mary whom Raymond saved from poverty when she was a child. As Raymond prepares his operatory, Clarke waits in a chair and begins dreaming of a walk in the woods he had taken as a child, only this time with disturbing results. “For a moment in time he stood face to face there with a presence, that was neither man nor beast, neither the living nor the dead, but all things mingled, the form of all things but devoid of all form.” Finally Raymond brings the girl in to perform the operation, but Clarke is a little too squeamish to look directly at the surgical field. When she wakes up afterward it is clear things have not gone according to plan.

          The muscles of her face were hideously convulsed, she shook from her head to foot; the soul
          seemed struggling and shuddering within the house of flesh. It was a horrible sight, and Clarke
          rushed forward, as she fell shrieking to the floor . . . Three days later Raymond took Clarke to
          Mary’s bedside . . . “Yes,” said the doctor, still quite cool, “it is a great pity; she is a hopeless idiot.
          However, it could not be helped; and, after all, she has seen the Great God Pan.”

The second chapter moves to Clarke at home. It soon becomes clear that his experience with Dr. Raymond is one of many that the man seeks out to satisfy his curiosity about unexplained phenomena in the world. “The horrors that he had witnessed in the dreary laboratory were to a certain extent salutary . . . Clarke had a fine contempt for published literature; the most ghostly story ceased to interest him if it happened to be printed; his sole pleasure was in the reading, compiling, and rearranging what he called his “Memoirs to prove the Existence of the Devil.” One of his manuscripts, given to him by a Dr. Phillips, concerns a young girl named Helen who was placed by her adopted father in a rural house in which to grow up. He paid the family plenty of money and left strict instructions to allow her to do whatever she wanted. Most of Helen’s days were spent wandering in the woods from sunup until dusk. The only clue to what she did out there came from a small boy who happened on her one day. He saw her playing with a “strange naked man” and became a frightened and fearful boy from that day on. It was only later, in the house of a gentleman his father was doing work for, that “they were both horrified by a piercing shriek and the sound of a fall, and rushing out they found the child lying senseless on the floor, his face contorted with terror.” It turns out the boy had seen a stone gargoyle that was believed to be in the form of a satyr, the implication being this was the strange man he had seen Helen with.

Helen’s story continues when she befriends another girl named Rachel, and the younger girl begins accompanying Helen on her nature walks.

          “One evening, however, after Rachel had come home, her mother heard a noise which sounded
          like suppressed weeping in the girl’s room, and on going in found her lying, half undressed, upon
          the bed, evidently in the greatest distress. As soon as she saw her mother, she exclaimed, “Ah,
          mother, mother, why did you let me go to the forest with Helen?” Mrs. M. was astonished at so
          strange a question, and proceeded to make inquiries. Rachel told her a wild story. She said--"
          Clarke closed the book with a snap . . .

At this point Clarke remembers Phillips telling him the rest of the story, so horrified at what happened that he couldn’t believe it. “‘My God!’ he had exclaimed, ‘think, think what you are saying. It is too incredible, too monstrous; such things can never be . . . There must be some explanation, some way out of the terror. Why, man, if such a case were possible, our earth would be a nightmare.’” This is a technique Lovecraft would use later, allowing the reader’s imagination to run wild, a force more powerful than anything Machen could have written down. Though he does end the chapter with Clarke writing in Latin: “And the Devil was made incarnate and was made into man.”

The third chapter concerns a Mr. Villiers who enjoyed walking through London’s more interesting neighborhoods at night. One evening when a beggar comes up to him he recognizes the man as gentleman he had gone to school with, a Mr. Herbert. After taking him home and feeding him Herbert begins to recount the story of his downfall, which began with his marriage to a woman named Helen. “The night of the wedding I found myself sitting in her bedroom in the hotel . . . I listened to her as she spoke in her beautiful voice, spoke of things which even now I would not dare whisper in the blackest night, though I stood in the midst of a wilderness . . . I have seen the incredible, such horrors that even I myself sometimes stop in the middle of the street and ask whether it is possible for a man to behold such things and live.” Apparently Herbert sold his entire estate, and Helen took the money and left him destitute. Later, Villiers meets another gentleman, Mr. Austin, and he is told the story of Herbert’s former house in London while he was married to Helen. A man was found dead in the front yard and even the doctors couldn’t determine a cause of death. When Austin confronted one of the doctors later, the physician had this to say: “I know perfectly well what caused death. Blank died of fright, of sheer, awful terror; I never saw features so hideously contorted in the entire course of my practice, and I have seen the faces of a whole host of dead.”

Chapter Four then returns to Mr. Clarke who is visited one night by Mr. Villiers, who tells him the story of his old schoolmate, Herbert. Clarke, however, has no idea that he was married to the same Helen that was in the story told to him by Phillips. It turns out that Herbert was found dead recently, starved to death in his room. Villiers had gone to Herbert’s former London home, which had remained empty since Herbert and Helen moved out, and discovered a drawing, which he hands to Clarke. After looking at the drawing, of a woman’s portrait, he experiences the same sensations as he had during the operation in Chapter One. Then he turns the picture over and finds the word “Helen” written on the back. While Villiers is intent upon finding the woman, Clarke has barely enough energy to usher him out of his house. In Chapter Five Villiers meets again with Austin, and shows him a letter he received from Clarke urging him to burn the portrait and cease his attempts to find Helen. As the two are walking they find themselves in front of the home of a wealthy widow named Mrs. Beaumont from South America. Austin’s rooming house is nearby and they go there. He tells Villiers about the death of an artist he knew, who died in Argentina, and left him a book of sketches. They turn out to be frightening images. “The figures of Fauns and Satyrs and Aegipans danced before his eyes, the darkness of the thicket, the dance on the mountain-top, the scenes by lonely shores, in green vineyards, by rocks and desert places, passed before him: a world before which the human soul seemed to shrink back and shudder.” And on the last page of the book is a portrait of Helen.

Chapter Six begins with the apparent suicide of one of the most happy and convivial gentlemen in all of London who had hanged himself, and with it a strong feeling by the reader that somehow Helen is responsible. In the coming weeks, three more men are found to have committed suicide in exactly the same manner, none of them with even the slightest possibility of an explanation. At this point it’s Austin who comes to see Villiers, curious about the man’s inquiries into the whereabouts of Mrs. Herbert. Clarke is apparently refusing to assist with the investigation, and since Villiers knew one of the men who killed themselves he hasn’t looked into things any further, except to believe she had gone abroad. When Austin tells about meeting Mrs. Beaumont, with whom the first victim had dined the night before, Villiers has the feeling that it might be Helen, though he doesn’t say it aloud. Then a paperboy comes up the street, and the news tells of a fifth hanging victim. Villiers, it turns out, had seen this man leaving the house of Mrs. Beaumont the night before, and ran away from him in horror. “I almost fainted as I looked. I knew I had looked into the eyes of a lost soul, Austin, the man’s outward form remained, but all hell was within it. Furious lust, and hate that was like fire, and the loss of all hope and horror that seemed to shriek aloud to the night . . . That man no longer belonged to this world; it was a devil’s face I looked upon.”

Three weeks later Austin returns to Villiers’ house in Chapter Seven and learns that he believes Mrs. Beaumont is actually Helen Herbert. Villiers claims he had no expectation of discovering Helen while searching into the past of Mrs. Beaumont, but nevertheless the two became one amidst his inquiries. For the reader, a shocking discovery happens when the origins of both women begin with her true identity, Mary Raymond, the girl that Clarke had seen operated on, who had evidently seen the great god Pan. His description of following Ms. Raymond / Mrs. Herbert has a distinct resemblance to Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, especially when he follows her to the house of Mrs. Beaumont and she goes inside. Villiers recounts going to see Clarke and receiving a manuscript of a man who escaped the Beaumont house with his life and little else. As Austin glances at the text he quickly says, “Take it away, Villiers, never speak of this again. Are you made of stone, man? Why, the dread and horror of death itself, the thoughts of the man who stands in the keen morning air on the black platform, bound, the bell tolling in his ears, and waits for the harsh rattle of the bolt, are as nothing compared to this. I will not read it; I should never sleep again.” Villiers’ plan is to confront Helen with Clarke, give her a piece of rope and tell her she has a choice before he calls the police. Austin gives Villiers one last piece of news before he goes. The woman his artist friend was seeing in Argentina before he died was Helen.

The final chapter begins with a fragment of text that, again, like Lovecraft enjoyed doing, could only hint at in words what the writer had experienced with his eyes. The story is from a Dr. Matheson, apparently describing a body he had been called in to look at.

          I saw the form waver from sex to sex, dividing itself from itself, and then again reunited. Then I
          saw the body descend to the beasts whence it ascended, and that which was on the heights go
          down to the depths, even to the abyss of all being. The principle of life, which makes organism,
          always remained, while the outward form changed . . . as a horrible and unspeakable shape,
          neither man nor beast, was changed into human form, there came finally death

The fragment is part of a letter from Clarke to Dr. Raymond, telling about what he and Villiers had witnessed along with the doctor after Helen killed herself. Clarke goes on to wrap the story up by hinting at what Helen had done in the woods. But it’s the return letter from Raymond that provides the chilling conclusion, as he gives the true identity of Helen.

At the time it was published Machen managed to achieve accolades of sorts, with the general press severely criticizing the story as being too horrific and suggestively sexual, tantamount to a badge of honor for a writer of the macabre. Of course H.P. Lovecraft was a huge fan of the story, saying, “No one could begin to describe the cumulative suspense and ultimate horror with which every paragraph abounds.” But he was just as conscious of how far belief must be suspended in telling a story of this nature, much as he would have to do in his own work. “Melodrama is undeniably present, and coincidence is stretched to a length which appears absurd upon analysis; but in the malign witchery of the tale as a whole these trifles are forgotten, and the sensitive reader reaches the end with an appreciative shudder.” Ultimately it’s the structure here that is so compelling. It’s a lengthy story, but nothing is really superfluous. All of the pieces of the mystery gradually fall into place along the way, and the reader’s own calculations and predictions are used to fill in the rest of the tale.

There are a couple of unique aspects to the story, one being that the character of Helen is never really part of the plot, as such. That is because everything in the story is reported by someone else rather than having the reader experience it along with the narrator. Again, this is what connects the story to Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, for which Machen’s work must have been an inspiration. Straub used the idea of a woman who went after men and destroyed their lives, but took it across generations. He even had his protagonists sit around and tell ghost stories in their Chowder Society. Much has been written about Machen’s story but those detailed analyses tend to lose track of the point. Dr. Raymond created a portal for evil to come into this world when he operated on Mary, similar to what Lovecraft would write about his entire career. Part of Machen’s genius was to combine sex with the horrific, a perfect combination for Victorian readers. But the story is still impressive today in the way that it gradually unfolds its horrors for the reader. As such, “The Great God Pan” remains a classic for good reason.

Sunday, October 30, 2016

Children of the Corn (1977)

by Stephen King

Children of the Corn is one of the dozens of bad films made from Stephen King stories. The story in question, “Children of the Corn,” first appeared in Penthouse magazine in 1977, one of first group of stories by the author that were published in men’s magazines and collected in his book Night Shift. As someone who lived through the seventies the story is very much of its time. It begins with a couple travelling across country. Burt Robeson and his wife are making a last-ditch attempt to salvage their marriage, but things rapidly deteriorate when they take the scenic route in Nebraska and get lost among the cornfields. Like the stories of Raymond Carver, they reflect the un-evolved nature of relationships at the time. Of his protagonist, King says, “He was gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles were white. He decided he was holding it that tightly because if he loosened up, why, one of those hands might just fly off and hit the ex-Prom Queen beside him right in the chops.” It was a time not so different from our own, except that that no one would write about spousal abuse today with the expectation of laughter from his audience. As Burt takes his eyes off the road to argue with Vicky he runs over something in the road, which turns out to be the body of a young boy whose throat was cut. Out in the cornfield he finds a suitcase and fresh blood on the leaves, leading him to understand that the boy would be dead even if he hadn’t hit him.

Robeson is a Vietnam vet, and keeps a shotgun in the back of his car. After Vicky gets it for him he wraps the body and a blanket and puts it in the trunk of his car, intending to take it to the nearest town. All the while, Robeson can’t escape the feeling he’s being watched from the cornfields. Turning on the radio a sermon blasts from the speakers, “There’s some that thinks it’s okay to get out in the world without being smirched by the world. Now, is that what the word of God teaches us?” It is the voice of a young man, and the kind of villain that King was drawn to early in his career, fundamentalist religious zealots whose syntax betray his New England upbringing and would be uses in novels like The Dead Zone. For Vicky Robeson, the words bring back only angry memories of her own childhood and she snaps off the sound. She tells Burt all about the many children who were “possessed” by God and used by religious leaders to win converts at tent revivals. But here descriptions sound more like freaks show carnival attractions. “She nodded at his look of unbelief. “There were plenty of them on the circuit. They were good draws.’” But all Burt can think of is a phrase he heard just before the radio went off, “No room for the defiler of the corn.” In the suitcase is a crucifix made of cornhusks and a figure of Jesus made from a dried corncob, which gives Vicky the creeps.

Once in the tiny town of Gatlin Burt is intent on finding a police station, but Vicky demands that they turn around and head back to the highway because she is convinced that there are no people in the town. Sure enough, the local coffee shop is empty, though they do hear the laughter of children in the distance. What Burt also notices is the smell. The fertilizer he was used to smelling in upstate New York when he was a boy, was somehow mingled with the smells he associated with his work as a medical orderly in Vietnam. Burt then tries the church on the corner, the only building that looks as if someone has been there recently. In the vestibule King has Burt inexplicably take the time to rearrange the letters that had once been attached to the front of the building spelling out the name of the church. Inside, along with a creepy Christ made of corn, he finds log books implying that something had happened to the crops around the town in 1964 and people were being killed as a sacrifice to God to bring back the corn—killed before their twentieth birthday. A blast on the car horn sends Burt running outside, only to find Vicky and the car surrounded by children with knives and other implements of death, and he watches impotently as they attack.

          They converged on the Thunderbird. The axes and hatchets and chunks of pipe began to rise and
          fall. My God, am I seeing this? he thought frozenly. Knives crawled spirals through the sidewalls of
          the tires and the car settled. The horn blared on and on. The windshield and side windows went
          opaque and cracked under the onslaught. . . and then the safety glass sprayed inwards and he could
          see again. Vicky was crouched back, only one hand on the horn ring now, the other thrown up to
          protect her face. Eager young hands reached in. She beat them away wildly. The horn became
          intermittent and then stopped altogether.

As the children drag Vicky out of the car, Burt runs toward her and is hit with a pocketknife in the arm. As the boy who threw it comes for him, Burt pulls the blade out and kills the boy with it. But in the time it has taken him to do this, Vicky has disappeared, one of the boys indicating she has been killed. So when the children give chase, Burt begins to run. He heads down the street, all the way out of town and in desperation, once beyond the city limits, he dives into the green sea of corn. By the time the sun begins to set, he can’t hear them chasing him anymore and begins to walk toward the road. But before long he notices that the rustling of the stalks that he has been hearing for some time can’t be the result of the wind, because there is no wind. Then, as he comes into a clearing he realizes something strange about the fields. Not only were there no bugs that he could see, but no weeds of any kind. It didn’t seem possible. As the light nearly disappears, he comes into a clearing and sees Vicky.

          She had been mounted on a crossbar like a hideous trophy, her arms held at the wrists and her
          legs at the ankles with twists of common barbed wire, seventy cents a yard at any hardware store
          in Nebraska. Her eyes had been ripped out. The sockets were filled with the moonflax of cornsilk.
          Her jaws were wrenched open in a silent scream, her mouth filled with cornhusks.

Before he can run, or do anything else, Burt hears something coming through the corn. He doesn’t live long enough to see the moon come up. At the meeting of the children of the corn the next day, it becomes clear that whatever is killing the children is not the other children. When the children reach nineteen they simply walk into the corn at night and never come out again. Those of childbearing age gave birth and then walked out into the corn when they were of age. And the cycle continues.

“Children of the Corn” is a classic King story, ordinary people out of their element, meeting up with the inexplicable. One of the things that King was always impressed with was the idea of the monster that was never seen. In this case the children were attempting to appease the monster by allowing them to kill those who grew to adulthood. Or perhaps the monster had already killed the adults and created the town of children in the first place. Anything a reader can imagine, he always said, is much more frightening that what a writer can put on the page. But more disturbing is the idea of how religion twists the minds of children before they ever reach the age of understanding. This is something Vicky has vivid recollections of, episodes that have left a bad taste in her mouth ever since childhood.

          That’s what’s so monstrous about the whole trip. They like to get ahold of them when their minds
          are still rubber. They know how to put all the emotional checks and balances in. You should have
          been at some of the tent meetings my mother and father dragged me to . . . some of the ones I was
          ‘saved’ at.”

Later, when she refuses to go into the church, the revulsion is clear. “I haven’t been in a church since I left home and I don’t want to be in this church and I don’t want to be in this town.”

The truth is, the story works almost better without the presence of the supernatural in the form of He Who Walks Behind The Rows. The story has been compared to Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” and with good reason. The delusion of religion is fertile ground for those who don’t have a complete grip on sanity. And religion provides them with something akin to a state sanctioned justification for their delusions. As such, the supernatural belief in sacrifice that is the underpinning of all Christian sects can be easily transferred to the real world and murder rationalized away by the religiously unhinged. Combine that with the perversion of childhood that has been written about in numerous stories and novels, turning childhood innocence on its head and making it evil, and the evil the men do becomes more than enough to sustain the horror King was after. The small, isolated town is also something that H.P. Lovecraft was fond of using, though King’s New England seems a much more likely location that the Midwest. And the one aspect of the story that strains credulity is how the town could stay isolated for twelve years.

The coda that King ended the story with is not only the creepiest part of the story, but somewhat titillating with children becoming pregnant and committing what amounts to suicide before they turn twenty.

          And that night all of those now above the Age of Favor walked silently into the corn and went to
          the clearing, to gain the continued favor of He Who Walks Behind the Rows. ‘Goodbye, Malachi,’
          Ruth called. She waved disconsolately. Her belly was big with Malachi’s child and tears coursed
          silently down her cheeks. Malachi did not turn. His back was straight. The corn swallowed him.

The film version of the story didn’t hit the screen until 1984. King himself wrote the original screenplay, which was basically an expanded version of the story. The emphasis was on the two protagonists and an expanded history of the children. But King’s screenplay was abandoned in favor of one by George Goldsmith that was more of a conventional horror story. It did build on one aspect at the end of King’s story, where Ruth expresses her dissatisfaction with the cult. “Ruth turned away, still crying. She had conceived a secret hatred for the corn and sometimes dreamed of walking into it with a torch in each hand when dry September came and the stalks were dead and explosively combustible.” In the film Goldsmith had Burt and Vicky survive long enough to join forces with Ruth and Job to defeat the cult. The film spawned a lengthy series of equally tepid films as well as a recent TV movie, but none capture the shock and paranoia of the original. Stephen King’s “Children of the Corn” is ultimately a story in the classic King vein that, while not necessarily one of his best, is certainly entertaining.