A Genre Writing

A writer is a man who’s taught his mind to misbehave.

                                                                        - from Bag of Bones by Stephen King

            There was a vast manor house near where I used to live, and we would often pass it in the fall when we were returning from…something. I honestly don’t remember that part all too well, as it hardly seemed relevant to me. But I remember the house, for whenever we passed it I could feel a chill running down my spine. Because I knew that house. It was the house of the Autarchs.

            See, this was the same year when I began to listen to the novels of John Bellairs, and from the ambivalent silence, I can tell you have never heard of him. That doesn’t surprise me. He began his career with a bang of a fantasy novel, or at least it seemed like a bang in the late sixties, before the flood of cheap Tolkien knock offs. His was an odd book, partly comic and partly horrific, with all the hobbits and warriors cut out, so that the main conflict was between three old wizards. It’s often placed in the children’s section nowadays, because it lacks the requisite sex, violence and language to be in either the adult or young adult section, but, because of the age of its protagonists, it holds no joy for children either. So it haunts the shelves of libraries everywhere, unread by all except those like me who are fans of the deceased Mr. Bellairs.

            But, back to the reference, the Autarchs are the villains of his novel The Mansion in the Mist, an audiobook I listened to with near religious fervor when I was nine and ten, a substitute perhaps for the more formalized religion that I never possessed any real believe that was on sale there. The book was, in retrospect, a good but fairly typical work by John Bellairs. The stories he wrote all followed a similar storyline, boy (X years old), with older, and ostensibly wiser, companions stumble upon a plot to destroy the world hatched by an evil sorcerer or sorceress, with one of those deliciously old fashioned names like Ezekiel Morley. The plot would often involve an old fashioned but fairly everyday object, like a lamp or a clock hidden inside the walls of a house that counts down to the end of the world…like you don’t have one of those.

            His tales were mostly in one of three series, focusing on the misadventures of a few teenager boys of varying ages in Michigan. From what I can tell, the most popular series was the Lewis Barnavelt, followed by Johnny Dixon, with the rearguard brought up by the Anthony Monday series. And of course, as a contrarian, I always loved the Anthony Monday series the most. The character was a little older, and his companions were a librarian and her eccentric brother, something I found remarkably easy to relate to, though I can’t quite say why. Of course, it helped that the covers for the Anthony Monday books were done by that master of horrific comedy Edward Gorey.

            John Bellairs was my first foray into horror, a genre that as a young child, and even as an older one, I found to be a tad too much for me. My mind has always seemed eager to conjure up images to frighten and disturb its vessel. I had, I remember, a particular fear of Halloween masks, which persists, although even then it was les a visceral reaction to that plastic substance they are made of that I always worried would suffocate me. Not that I was overly morbid, just that my mind would often run away with me, and it still does from time to time.

            As I grew up, though, I began to hold a greater fondness for the genre. My particular favorites have always been Stephen King, as you can tell from the epigraph of this piece, and Shirley Jackson, whose best work seems to have been forgotten, particularly We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a novel that seems in some ways a precursor to A Series of Unfortunate Events. I like horror stories (though the better term is terror stories, but that’s besides the point) because they seem to make my mind misbehave in often bizarre and disturbing, but also sort of interesting and fun, ways.

Anything scary has also produced such an effect in me. I can distinctly remember the late nights filled with checking and rechecking and finally giving up on checking for monsters and beasts beneath my bed. Though sleep when it comes, maintains its steadfast grip on me till dawn, the hypnagogic state is fraught with a dreaded tension. Horror novels however, are rarely the source anymore, as there are a million more pressing and real dangers; most of them involving the somewhat worrying possibilities of my own body betraying me in new and hideous ways. Like an aneurism or a malignant tumor. So now horror novels are more of a pleasurable distraction than an actual terror inducing experience. Except for those nights, when my mind will misbehave.