Stefan Beck Online

The road of the dead

Perhaps you haven’t heard, but Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road has as its centerpiece a headless baby roasted on a spit. In a movie, this sort of thing would likely be ridiculed as sensational overkill. Not since William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, with its “bales of aborted fetuses,” can I recall such hideous imagery. This year, however, the road to the Pulitzer is paved with dead babies. McCarthy, it was recently announced, is the fiction winner. It seems I’m alone in wondering why.

In light of a weekend movie marathon, I’m ready to venture a guess: McCarthy’s readers must be unfamiliar with the films of George A. Romero, who for decades has delivered end-of-days scenarios both strikingly similar to and more convincing than McCarthy’s. Not bad for a guy who makes zombie movies.

At least one critic of McCarthy’s book invoked the undead. Gail Caldwell of The Boston Globe wrote: “There are moments in The Road that don’t seem so much preposterous (granted, we would have to eat something) as they do hokey—I kept seeing zombies in my mind’s eye, which is not a good image recommendation for serious literature.”

McCarthy’s book is a horror story, but because its villains are cannibals and not zombies—shorthand for grade-B schlock—it can apparently be taken seriously without any danger to one’s professional reputation. Still, The Road comes up short of Romero’s presumably laughable zombie flicks. As a parable, The Road can make its point without fleshed-out characters; Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978), despite being comfortable with their status as “genre trash,” don’t have the same luxury. Yes, they’re about monsters, but they’re also compelling snapshots of humanity in extremis.

The Road is a tracking shot of a father and son in an ashen wilderness empty of food, shelter, and human contact. It is never stated—but is earnestly implied—that some nuclear event has brought humanity to its current state. In Romero’s movies, the situation has much the same outline. The dead have risen again—the catalyst, though hinted at, is ultimately irrelevant—and the living must cooperate to save themselves, whether by violence or cunning.

In McCarthy’s world, humanity will, in the face of a global catastrophe, revert to barbarism to survive. Cannibalism is for the balance of mankind the order of the day, though miraculously it remains unthinkable for one father and his son. This sets up an affecting contrast between good and evil. The Road is, make no mistake, a heart-rending book. One finds it both easy and painful to identify with its heroes, if for no other reason than that they act as any human being worth his salt would in such circumstances. The trouble is, there’s no chance to identify with anyone else. Our sympathies are deftly manipulated.

As a thought experiment, ask yourself what Oprah, who has made The Road her latest Book Club selection, would do to survive the End Times. Can you picture her squatting by a campfire, feasting on a baby? Probably not. Surely, some would sink to this grotesque level, but not all—maybe not even most. How can readers find McCarthy’s vision so convincing when not one of them can put himself in the cannibal camp? Which is where the book loses steam. It’s never hard to imagine the worst case; to imagine a bad case, with its subtleties of triumph, terror, and disappointment, is more difficult, not only artistically but also morally.

Yet Romero managed all that, and with B-movies, no less. In Night, he shows us masculine pride and self-pity put to the test: A man trying to keep his wife and daughter safe is forced to risk them when a bolder, and possibly better, plan is placed in front of him. Will he go along with it, though it challenges his own timidity and stubbornness? Or will he just assert his authority and hope for the best? This is a choice we can honestly feel, in which personality is brought into sharp relief. Watching it play itself out, we forget that the driving peril is flesh-eating ghouls; it could be anything.

Romero’s movies aren’t really about zombies—they’re about personalities colliding in the crucible of a dire situation. In Dawn, there’s a man with a pregnant girlfriend, with whom he clashes; her assertiveness and initiative threaten his ego in a situation that’s already doing plenty to diminish it.

Here, honor and humility are bound up with survival in ways that force us to ask ourselves: Would I be dead weight, paralyzed by fear? Would I betray a friend? Would I exploit the weak to survive? Would I sacrifice myself for others? Would I take charge? McCarthy’s book asks whether it would be possible or worthwhile to hold on to humanity, to goodness, in a truly evil world. That, for most of us, there is only one answer—and that it’s a reassuring one—accounts for much of the book’s popularity. The Road has all the horror and violence of a Romero film, but little of Romero’s feel for how people often react to hopelessness and fear with fortitude and heroism. It isn’t a one-in-a-million thing. Pessimism should not be mistaken for wisdom.

One wonders, reading all the wide-eyed reviews of The Road: Are people responding to a perceptive look at man on his last legs? Or are they mostly getting a charge out of horror, that much-maligned genre? A trip to the Midnight Movies section of your video store should provide the answer: In the only important sense, McCarthy gives us more zombies than Romero does.

Subterranean homesick blues

A friend and I once toured the American South and came upon Kentucky’s Carter Caves State Park. Though the weather was rotten and we were the only campers keen on a tour, the guide (who’d apparently time-traveled from the late Sixties) was happy to oblige us. We repaid his courtesy by jeering at the cave’s lone thumb-sized Pipistrellus pipistrellus, which slept peacefully beneath a spotlight.

“Okay, dudes,” said the guide, “you want bats? I got bats.” Shortly thereafter, we were running down a narrow passageway in a “restricted” cave, chased by a tornado of wings and fangs. When we emerged, our guide put down his Camberwell Carrot just long enough to fix his red eyes upon us and indulge in a fit of ghastly cackling. That was my first and last encounter with the horror of the underworld.

Had I been acquainted with David Standish’s Hollow Earth, bats would have been the least of my worries. I’d have been more concerned about tumbling down a rabbit hole into some vast, phosphorescent nightmare, crawling with terrestrials no less alien than anything Mars might have to offer.

Standish has compiled a detailed and peculiar (not to mention very nicely illustrated) history of an idea that has inspired many generations of inward-looking minds, from scientists and explorers to cranks and novelists.

We shouldn’t laugh too hard, though—the hollow hypothesis began in earnest as a legitimate scientific inquiry.

Edmond Halley, of comet fame, attempted to explain magnetic variation—the tendency of a compass to deviate over time from true north—in these terms: “the External Parts of the Globe may well be reckoned as the Shell, and the internal as a Nucleus or inner Globe included within ours.” (An extra rotating globe meant extra magnetic poles.) To Halley’s credit, he noted, “I doubt not but this will find Opposers enough.”

Perhaps—but others arrived at similar conclusions.

In 1818, Captain John Cleves Symmes, a doubtless badly shell-shocked veteran of the War of 1812, distributed a pamphlet in St. Louis claiming that “the earth is hollow and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentric spheres . . . and that it is open at the poles twelve or sixteen degrees.” He proposed an expedition to these “Symmes holes,” but, though he lived in a time of great interest in Arctic exploration, his plan was never realized.

Symmes did, however, set the ball rolling for a successful subgenre of science fiction. He wrote, under the pseudonym “Captain Adam Seaborn,” a utopian novel (the first American one of its kind) called Symzonia: Voyage of Discovery (1820), which speculated about the inner realm and which, hilariously, referred to Symmes himself as a “profound philosopher.”

Standish’s book is most successful as a literary history—literature, both the good and the divertingly abysmal, being the one thing of true value that this hollow idea holds. In this regard, Hollow Earth at least feels exhaustive, spelunking the vast and terrible depths of forgotten fiction.

Most of us are familiar with Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s At the Earth’s Core, but have we traveled to Atvatabar, the subject of William R. Bradshaw’s 1892 novel? Proving once more that wherever there is a hollow-earther, comedy is not far behind, the book included an introduction by Julian Hawthorne (son of Nathaniel) in which he argues Bradshaw’s supremacy over such limp literary cave fish as Tolstoy and Zola.

Such fun facts abound. The first work of Canadian science fiction, we learn, is an anonymous hollow earth story, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888), in which a race “practice[s] human sacrifice on hundreds of willing victims.”

Standish relates the plots of many works, but I was delighted, above all, to learn of Etidorhpa, an 1895 novel by a pharmacist named John Uri Lloyd. The narrator begins his infernal journey at “a cave opening in Kentucky, where he is met by his guide—a gray-skinned eyeless humanoid creature. . . . But the trip, while physical, is largely spiritual.” In the attendant illustrations, the “guide” looks like a more benign version of the predators in Neil Marshall’s film The Descent, and is seen surrounded by giant mushrooms. Well, who couldn’t use a bit more spirituality? Perhaps I shouldn’t have run from that cave after all.

Here be monsters

I owe the discovery of monsters to an old children’s book of myths. I can still bring to mind its lurid pictures of the Minotaur and Grendel’s dam, which, despite the terror they inspired, I loved better than any childhood pet. It is no surprise that Borges, that master fabulist, shared this impatience with the zoology of the real world.

In 1954, he wrote a work to out-beast all other bestiaries. It is easy to see why his Book of Imaginary Beings remains a classic of its kind.

One finds herein old faithfuls like the Minotaur (a favorite of the man whose best-known book is called Labyrinths), yes, but also the bewildering cryptofauna of regions as far flung as Egypt, Scotland, China, India, and France. It is unlikely that many will encounter outside this compendium “The Hairy Beast of La Ferté-Bernard,” which was “the size of a bull, though it had the head of a serpent and a round body covered with shaggy green hair and bristling spines whose prick meant death to men.” (Unlikely—and, from the sounds of things, fortunate.)

The same goes, surely, for such unusual creatures as the “A Bao A Qu” (which space does not permit me to describe), the first of the book’s alphabetical entries, and the Zaratan, the living beast-island on which sailors meet their doom, with which the book concludes. And who, apart from a Talmudic scholar, is aware of our collective debt to the Lamed Wufniks, “thirty-six just men whose mission is to justify the world to God”?

That we have never heard of some of Borges’s “pets” is a testament to his polymathic learning: Among his sources are Pliny, Lucan, Ariosto, Sir Richard Francis Burton, Flaubert, and One-Tae-Hae. He even includes entries for beings known only to readers of Kafka, Poe, and C. S. Lewis, and to devotees of Emanuel Swedenborg. Some beasts are described by way of poetry, e.g., the Kraken with a piece of Tennyson’s juvenilia and the Basilisk with a snatch of Quevedo’s romance, El Basilisco. A patient combing-over of the endnotes will guide one to a lifetime’s reading.

Andrew Hurley, whom readers may know for his Penguin Classics editions of The Aleph and A Universal History of Iniquity, capably preserves both Borges’s crystalline prose and his humor. And that humor is surpassingly subtle. An example is Borges’s deadpan aside about some creatures that “no one, surely, has ever believed in.” Where did he come upon these unthinkable monstrosities? The banks of the Nile? The peaks of Nepal?

Try again. The correct answer is “Wisconsin and Michigan.” Borges can countenance six-legged antelopes, a 100-headed fish, and an eight-forked serpent. His credulity, however, stops short of the Axehandle Hound, a sort of ax-shaped Dachshund that eats nothing but axehandles, and the Goofang, which “swims backward so water won’t get in its eyes.” Unless, as one is inclined to suspect, Borges’s remark is wryly poking fun at credulity itself.

It is probably clear by now that these imaginary beings are not really of the X-Files variety. There are no extraterrestrials, Nessie, or Sasquatch. Fine, but what about vampires, hellhounds, or zombies, for which Borges could have found ample and suitably esoteric folkloric sources? What about Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril-ya, Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones, or Wyndham’s Triffids? Finally, one can’t help wishing for a little commentary on the Chupacabras, that thirsty little fellow indigenous to Borges’s own beloved Argentina. I suppose that would have been, so to speak, too good to be true.

All in all, this book’s delights more than justify its omissions. It has only one disappointment. Alas, it is an important one. We learn from the jacket copy that the book’s illustrator, Peter Sís, has been the recipient of a number of awards for his artwork. I am at pains to understand why. The delicate, pointillistic doodles that mar this edition are a bad match not only for the monsters, but for the vigor and humor of Borges’s text. I can’t imagine that they would give a child nightmares—and that, it must be said, is the only really reliable test.

They’re coming to get you

You've been cuckolded by a smooth-talking pygmy from Polarissima Borealis [NGC 3172]. Your wife confesses. “It was just a little injection,” she wails. “It didn’t mean anything!” So you agree to marriage counseling. Things start to look better—until nine months later, when you find yourselves in Maternity singing lullabies to a brood of cephalopod hatchlings. Forget about collecting child support: Bank of Scotland doesn’t change the Imperial Galactic Denarius, anyway.

If this sounds like your life, stop reading now. The last thing you need is Harvard University egghead Susan Clancy telling you that it’s just your imagination, that those things in the playpen don’t exist.

But if you’re even a little curious about the intersection of ufology, philosophy, neurology, and psychology, this slim but engaging volume is just the ticket.

Yes, it denies unequivocally that abductions take place, but it takes pains to respect the faithful. (Many books about the “historical” Jesus are far more insulting to Christians that Ms. Clancy is to purported abductees, though the latter are arguably a safer target.) Believers and skeptics alike have much to learn from this work.

It is interesting to note that Ms. Clancy did not, in fact, even set out to examine abductees. Her original topic of study was “recovered memory” in sexual abuse victims, but the subject became too emotionally charged. “One published letter,” she recalls, “called me a ‘friend of pedophiles everywhere.’”

John Mack’s abductee studies at Harvard Medical School gave her an idea: “Alien abductees were people who had developed memories of a traumatic event that I could be fairly certain had never occurred. . . . I needed to repeat the study with a population that I could be sure had ‘recovered’ false memories.”

And now I must address the audible gasps from the fortean peanut gallery.

Yes, her reasoning reveals a strong bias. No, it does not discredit her. Ms. Clancy’s criteria for judgment are rigorous and fair. After all, none of her interview subjects could supply physical evidence of alien contact; few of them seemed to understand why they might be expected to do so.

One man had developed epilepsy after sustaining brain damage in an accident. He attributed his subsequent depression to having been abducted several years prior to that accident—another hypnotically “recovered” memory.

The man did not, as Ms. Clancy notes, “understand the phrase ‘burden of proof’—which means that anyone who makes an extraordinary claim has to prove it, not expect others to disprove it.” Along those lines, she raises a gentle but devastating point. “For a given set of symptoms or experiences,” she writes, “there were countless possible causes.” So why settle contentedly on the least plausible one? Many chapters later, she asks, “Why are these genius aliens so dim? After fifty years of abducting us, why are they still taking the same bits and pieces? Don’t they have freezers?” The two questions are similar. They both hold the promise of a clean, close shave with Occam’s Razor.

So what does Ms. Clancy think is going on?

She concedes, as John Mack once did in markedly different terms, that most abductees believe what they’re saying. (She makes allusions to religious faith, but the two things are not quite the same. One could easily argue, after all, that a vivid and terrifying hallucination is more persuasive than a Sunday School teacher.) Ms. Clancy seems to think that the majority of abduction memories are conjured up by dodgy hypnotists or therapists—or even at will by the subjects themselves—during times when the mind is most suggestible.

This is not a particularly novel assertion. But a far more intriguing aspect of her argument centers on sleep paralysis. Again, SP may be old news to diehard forteans, but there is relatively little public awareness of this phenomenon.

Ms. Clancy writes: “About 20 percent of the population has had at least one episode of this type, accompanied by hallucinations.”

Both hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations—those occurring prior to sleep and to waking, respectively—can be identical to some of the more abstract abduction tales. The afflicted wakes up in the night, unable to move, with a powerful sense that some malevolent presence is in the room. Sometimes the presence chokes or molests the victim. In the days before science fiction, this was, of course, the succubus or “old hag.” With the advent of new cultural contexts, interpretations have changed. People are more likely to have nightmares about old X-Files episodes than about stories from Herodotus or the Bible.

It’s a good explanation, as far as it goes. For anyone who trusts in parsimony and the scientific method, it’s the best explanation going.

But it’s hardly flawless.

I’ve never forgotten my first bout of SP. (For the record, it never even occurred to me to blame it on aliens.) I woke up, unable to move, and felt that I was being watched from the corner of the room. I could almost make out someone standing there. I was not so much frightened as immeasurably sad. Well, you’re never too old to have a bad dream . . .

So I was understandably shaken when, seconds later, our cat began shrieking at the dark corner where my “hallucination” should have been. And I was even worse for the wear when, a day or two later, my mother asked, without the slightest provocation, whether I’d felt “something awful” in the house that night. I humbly submit that, as is always the case with these things, I have no evidence but my word of honor. But I have to ask Ms. Clancy: Shouldn’t the thing that’s all in my head, well, stay in my head?

I don’t believe in abductions and I don’t believe in succubae, but I’m not entirely ready to rule out “something awful”—whatever it might be.