Five Things About Fear (and other quality alliteration)

So, it's Halloween. All the pumpkins and green food dye don't do much for me, to be honest, but I am interested in what makes a book or film frightening. I think there are five main aspects:

1) Suspense versus action
Skilled writers and directors know that whatever they put on the screen can't be as nasty as what the reader or viewer can think up. That's why the exploring of the haunted house takes up much more screen time than the ghosts. The demons in Hellraiser, for instance, get less than 5 minutes of screen time. It's important to know the distinction between what's frightening and what's exhilarating. Frightening is when we are hiding - exhilarating is when we are fighting back.

"For ever... and ever...."

2) Power
Adversaries need to be dangerous, or to seem it. The skeletal robots of the Terminator films are relentless. The zombies in Night of the Living Dead may be slow, but they've got numbers, and they keep coming. Even in an action film like Where Eagles Dare, where the good guys are deadly commandos, they are going up against a much larger force. One robot or zombie or Nazi might not be much of a problem, but a whole load of them...

And then you have creatures like the cenobites of Hellraiser, or the ghosts in The Shining, which seem almost omnipotent in comparison to the people they hunt. The haunted house is much bigger than the people who enter it, and it holds all the cards. Of course, this can get ridiculous, like those slasher films where being insane seems to make you immune to gunfire, but a real expert knows how to balance this.


3) WTF?
Some of the strongest horror comes from a sense of not knowing quite what you're looking at. Until the very end of the film, the creature in Alien is never seen in full. The surreal beheading of Science Office Ash is only explained after he's stopped flailing around and squirting white slime. Until that point, it's like watching a nightmare.

There's an old BBC adaptation of M.R. James' ghost story "Oh Whistle and I'll Come To You, My Lad". In it, a professor dreams that he is being chased along a beach by... something. We know what we're literally looking at: it's clearly a sheet in a breeze. But the weird groaning sound it makes, coupled with the heartbeat on the soundtrack, makes us think "What the hell is that thing? Let's not find out!"

Whatever this is, it's not good. And it's getting closer.

4) Sympathetic characters
It's impossible to care about characters that you don't like. That means that they need to have sympathetic motivations, to act sensibly and to be convincingly portrayed. The Cabin in the Woods is a good parody of bad horror films: the characters are forced to act out the ritual roles of idiotic teenage victims in a slasher movie. It's when they get away from the conditioning that they become more likable.

However, "sympathetic" sometimes means "entertaining" or "realistic" rather than "charming". A character can win a lot of respect from readers by being sensible and active. Macready from The Thing starts off gruff and rather miserable: Alien's Ellen Ripley seems prissy and uptight when we first meet her. But the acting is good and, once trouble starts, they're sensible, active and behave like decent (if frightened) people.


5) Taste
Surprising one, this. But I think great directors know when to pull away. Often, all that's needed is the hint of what's going on to bring the horror home. This often involves overstepping the bounds - but knowing when to stop. You never see the knife in the victim in Psycho. The worst deaths in Alien are never seen. After all, whatever you see, you can probably imagine something worse.

And with those pleasant mental images, I'll see you next time.

The Appeal of Noir

Patrick Stewart and Alec Guiness in Smiley's People

When I first encountered Lidda the Rogue in the 3rd edition Dungeons and Dragons manual, I didn't run into a lot of fantasy that really suited me. That was probably my fault as much as the genre's, but there was a level of complexity and intrigue that I didn't see back then. I should probably have been looking harder.

I encountered the feeling I wanted to create more often outside fantasy than in it. I found it in noir: in the books of James M. Cain and early James Ellroy and above all, in the novels of Raymond Chandler, who I think is one of the best writers of the 20^th century. I also found it in William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, which defined the subgenre of cyberpunk in science fiction, and the murky, downbeat spy novels of John le Carre. All of these books contain violence, corruption and subterfuge, but there’s more to them than just chaos and death. All of them involve flawed characters trying to make the best of their position: whether by solving a mystery, hacking a company computer system, or unmasking a spy, using whatever cunning and improvised gear they can find.

Cover art by Josan Gonsalez. Note the obligatory cigarette!

And they all involve a sense of morality. Richard Morgan (of Altered Carbon fame) recently observed that all good noir involves not just noticing that the status quo is bad, but fighting against it. Raymond Chandler's detective Philip Marlowe struggles to find justice in the corruption of 1940s Los Angeles. George Smiley might fight dirty, but he’s most certainly on the right side of the Cold War. Even in the weird dystopia of Gibson’s world, there are real monsters to be defeated. That sense of justice seems to be to be one of the most basic human emotions. As Chandler himself put it in "The Simple Art of Murder": "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean".

Bit of a fantasy title, come to think of it

I think without this sense of morality - even a skewed morality that is as much about revenge as  justice - it's easy to produce a kind of war-porn, where the story exists for little more than shock value. Or, just as bad, you end up telling stories whose morals are too simple: yes, war is hell, but that's nothing new. As another author - in fact, one who'd written several Warhammer 40,000 novels - once told me, darkness works best when there's light for it to contrast with, and vice versa.

Up To The Throne isn’t a comedy, and contains no jokes. It’s also played entirely straight: there’s nothing ironic or post-modern in there, and it isn’t a parody or commentary on something else. Giuilia’s primary motivation is outrage, and, after that, the obligation to settle debts, both to her friends and enemies. But I think it’s easy to sympathise with someone like that. The sense of seeing corrupt and often downright evil people getting away with it is unpleasantly familiar.

As such, I think it is in the tradition of noir, as I understand it. A single determined person  looks for revenge in a corrupt city and, in doing so, uncovers a conspiracy. And that search takes them to some very dangerous places.

Woman With A Lockpick

Many, many years ago, I used to travel up to Cardiff every few months to visit my friends Owen and Alex. I’d stay in their house and generally make a nuisance of myself for a couple of days. Because I worked on Fridays, I’d get a late train and arrive at all sorts of weird and unhelpful times.

Once, I showed up while they had friends around, I think to play a game. I didn’t want to interrupt, so I started reading a Dungeons & Dragons manual that happened to be around (the Third Edition Players’ Handbook, to be precise). Flicking through, I stumbled upon the picture below.

It’s one of a set of pictures of example characters, who are depicted with various upgrades and specifications to demonstrate what can be done with the rules. This particular person is Lidda the Halfling Rogue, but I didn’t know that at the time.

It's interesting what prompts you (ie me) to write. Whatever subconscious reason there might have been, I looked at this picture and thought “This is the kind of person that I want to write about”.

What strikes me about this picture is its practicality. I don’t only mean the lack of exposed flesh, but the sense that this is a real person, with real problems. She’s peering at a lockpick (at least I think she is), and the end of her nose has gone pink, as if she’s got a cold. Things like that didn’t happen to fantasy characters when I was young, outside comedy.

And of course, the outfit. Actually, it’s not all that practical, and it seems to be largely made out of random off-cuts strapped together, but it looks warm and it’s got pads. After all, if you’re going to be picking locks and squeezing through windows, having reinforced gear is a pretty sensible idea. There’s also the interesting fact that her hair is rather elaborately braided, which hints at something other than practicality - vanity, or religious observance perhaps. If there are cyberpunks in fantasy, this is what they would look like.

 *

The heroine – or maybe protagonist is a more accurate word – of Up To The Throne doesn’t look much like Lidda, to be honest. Giulia is human, for starters, and rather more “normal” looking in terms of outfit. There are half a dozen other ways she differs, but I still look at this picture from time to time, to remind me of what this thing is all about. It’s about that sense of improvisation and pragmatism, of credible people behaving logically within a weird, impossible setting. 

I don't know who drew this. I've looked but, as with a lot of rulebook art, unless it's by one of the three or four people whose work I recognise, it's very hard to track down. So, if you do know who drew Lidda the Halfling Rogue Looking At A Lockpick, let me know. In the meantime, thanks, mystery artist.

Next time, some thoughts on noir. And maybe I'll tell my Games Workshop anecdote.

A Supercharged Renaissance

So, why set a fantasy novel in the Renaissance?

Well, first up, it's important to say that it isn't our Renaissance. It's the equivalent of our Renaissance in a fantasy world, where magical events happen and are expected to happen. It's what's known as a "low magic setting", in that impossible things don't occur all that often - which is lucky if you happen to live there, as a lot of the impossible things are really dangerous.

Such as this.

So, alongside the developments that humanity is making - in engineering, painting, literature and learning about the world - you have a small number of monsters, wizards, fey folk, revenants and other (frequently lethal) beings. Also, while there aren't many people with the magical skill to shoot lightning or turn people into frogs, there are some with the ability to strengthen mechanisms, summon weather, enchant objects and basically supercharge things that would otherwise hardly function into effective machinery. So, with the right enchantments, that clockwork cart that only rolls downhill and is so heavy that it sinks into the ground can potentially become a very useful and stylish set of wheels.

This could really happen!

But still, why the Renaissance?

For one thing, it's hard to pin down one period in one place as "the Renaissance". England barely had one, at least not in the same way as Italy. But we all know what the concept is, and it encompasses some really interesting things. Developments in thought, in scholarship, in art and in understanding man's position in the world really accelerated between 1400 and 1600 (in Europe, at any rate). It was also a time of some truly foul, vicious and crazy behaviour. Of course, I'm talking about something of a caricature, but that's how historical periods tend to be remembered. 

Giulia's world is a condensed and accelerated version of that (it's the magic, you see), in the same way that a lot of epic fantasy uses a condensed and exaggerated version of the Middle Ages (another long and varied time period). That enables a character to have lots of interesting adventures: in Giulia's world (if you had the cash), you could chat to a philosopher, buy a potion from an alchemist to change your appearance, steal a painting from a genius artist and go for a ride in a flying machine - or on a wyvern - on the same day. And then get murdered by a pack of revenants. It's not all perfect.

"I'll distract him with this hourglass while you loot the barrels."

There are other aspects, too: gunpowder was becoming more prevalent (very useful against those undead hordes) and Christianity (or its fantasy equivalent) was in serious turmoil. Both of those enter Giulia's world, in strange and distorted forms.


So you set Up To The Throne in the Renaissance because...

At some level, the answer to a question like this is always "because I think it's cool", and I'm not sure that's much of an answer at all. That aside, I think it comes down to possibilities. The Renaissance itself was a time of possibilities, when mankind's potential for greatness (and badness) was coming into its own in Europe. And Pagalia, where Up To The Throne is set, is a microcosm of that: a city where geniuses cross paths with assassins, and magical creatures clash with the fanatics who would wipe them out. Something really good could come of it - and something truly awful. Aptly, it's a powder-keg. All it needs is a spark...