THOUSAND YEAR OLD VAMPIRE

With the moon I run, far from the carnage of the fiery sun

Driven by the strangled vein, showing no mercy, I do it again

Open up your eyes, you keep on crying, baby, I’ll bleed you dry

Kings of Leon, “Closer”

SEVERAL AGES AGO I read (and later ran) Trevor Ackerly and Michael O’Brien’s terrific RuneQuest scenario, “The Old Sun Dome,” published in 1992’s Sun County. It stayed with me for decades. The story featured a vampire, and what particularly haunted me was its description. “The vampire no longer remembers its name,” the passage began. “It cannot recall where it came from or what deeds it did in mortal life. It has forgotten what tongues it once spoke.” I think I must have reread the lines a dozen times as the horror sank in. This was, after all, in the midst of the Anne Rice craze. Her vampires had such prodigious memories they could give lengthy interviews about the minutia of their entire existence in florid, purple prose, but this vampire no longer remembers its name. O’Brien and Ackerly had put their finger on what made immortality a curse, and the more you thought about it the more acute the “personal horror” of the idea became. The vampire in “The Old Sun Dome” was the vampire equivalent of Percy Shelly’s “Ozymandius,” a terror made somehow sad and wasted by the desolation of centuries, and it made the ones in Vampire: The Masquerade (published a year earlier) look like simple exercises in wish fulfillment. 

I thought of that vampire again decades later, when the ninth series of the revived Doctor Who introduced the character of Ashildr, played by Game of Throne’s own Maisie Williams. A 9th century Viking girl, the Doctor saves her life in such a way that it renders her immortal. When next they meet, six centuries later, she had taken to calling herself “Me” because she too has forgotten her name. Her lifespan is infinite, but not her memory. She writes in journals to preserve things, and tears out pages for things too painful to remember.

All this brings us to Tim Hutchings’ elegiac little masterpiece, Thousand Year Old Vampire. The plot is all right there in the title (spoilers!). You, the player, will create and take on the role of a vampire and (un)live out the millennium (give or take a few centuries) between the loss or your mortality and the eventual end of your existence. You will watch the world you knew and everything in it slowly crumble to dust, as incomprehensible new people and ideas replace it. Then you will watch these new ideas turn to dust and get replaced. And as the centuries slide by, you will fight to hold on to your memories, forced to either discard old memories in favour of new ones, or to cling to your ancient memories and forget the new ones. You will lose memories, loved ones, resources, and perhaps even your own name. But your existence goes on and on and on.

I still remember, I still love

I still remember, where I came from

Love to lover, days in the sun…

Grace Jones, “Seduction/Surrender”

TYOV is a solo game (though it does not have to be, read on) played with just you, the book, and somewhere to keep notes. A D10 and D6 are recommended, but there is a random number generator in the back of the book. It works like this: first you will create a vampire, and its powers, weakness, origin, and human identity are all up to you. Then, you play the vampire through a series of prompts in the rule book. The choices you make create a unique and often desolate saga of immortal existence. You can chose to play this quickly, all in a single sitting, or chose the journaling option where you write a vampire story as you play.

The Vampire

Your vampire is defined by Memories, Skills, Resources, Characters, and Marks.

The vampire begins play with five Memory “slots,” and since Memory is the most complex (and probably most important) part of the game we will spend the most time explaining it. Basically, a Memory is an episode of your existence, and it is in turn is made up of smaller “Experiences.” An Experience is a couple of sentences that sum up the character’s response to a prompt (more on those below). For example;

A prompt reads “How do you find solace from the raging hunger within you?” You decide that your vampire falls in love with a mortal, and for a time forgets his own curse. You write; 

 I sat and watched him from the windowsill, the moonlight sliding over his body, and the dead heart that no longer beat in my chest ached for him with a hunger that eclipsed my lust for blood. I did not wish to drain the life in him, but to preserve it.

This single response to the prompt is an Experience. But subsequent Experiences can be linked with this one (up to three total) and these linked experiences become a Memory. For example, another prompt reads “You commit a despicable murder, but not for the sake of feeding. Why?” You decide that you discover the object of your love has betrayed you with another, and kill him in a jealous rage. You write;

The woman lying naked beside him saw me first, and her scream filled the house. I ravaged her, her blood a red torrent down my throat. He watched me, helpless, and did nothing when I came to him and snapped his neck. Weeping, I watched the light go out in his eyes.

These two Experiences form a Memory that you call “Arad,” the name of the man you loved.

Every time you respond to a prompt, you create a new event which must either be linked to a previous Memory or form a new Memory all its own. The problem is, after awhile you will “fill up” (you can have five Memories of three Experiences each), so as new Events come you must start choosing which to keep and which to discard. You can delete older Memories to make space for the new, and yes…even forget your own name.

I’ll never wash these clothes, I want to keep the stain

Your blood to me is precious, nor would I shed it in vain

Sinead O’Connor, “You Made Me The Thief Of Your Heart”

Skills are things you are capable of doing or things you have done. Sometimes a prompt will tell you to check a skill. This means you use that Skill to resolve the prompt. Once checked, however, you cannot check it again, and must use a different skill in a later prompt. Prompts also give you new Skills from time to time. If you have no unchecked Skills, you fail the prompt and lose the game. Any Skill can resolve any prompt, but part of the game is explaining how. How does your “Ruthless Cunning” defeat the mob of vampire hunters? How does your “Silent as the Grave” defeat the invading army?

Resources are things the vampire owns or has at its disposal. Sometimes a prompt will give you a new resource, sometimes demand you expend one. Again, if you have no resources to expend, you lose the game. Resources can be as small as “a jeweled dagger” or as large as “a criminal empire.” Part of writing the Experience then is how you use the Resource to answer the prompt.

One of the more important Resources is the “diary.” A character may volunteer to shift a Memory into a Diary, allowing them to preserve it. However, there are prompts that destroy Resources, and it is very possible to lose one or more of your diaries in play. They can even fall into the hands of your enemies. 

Characters come in two varieties. Mortals are the humans, and Immortals are other vampires, demons, angels, deathless witches, etc. As with Resources sometimes a prompt will give you new characters and sometimes it will take them away. One common occurrence is with Mortal characters. To keep track of the passage of time, periodically you will be asked to scratch out Mortals from your character sheet, showing that they have aged and died. Characters can be allies, enemies, and everything in between.

Finally we have Marks. A Mark is something that marks you as inhuman. It might be a lack of reflection, icy skin, dead black eyes, claw like hands, etc. Certain prompts will cause you to gain Marks and others remove them.

The Prompts

All this brings us to the actual prompts. There are about 80 of these in the “core” game (though the book includes scores more for use after you have played a few times and need fresh ones). They are numbered, and they progress roughly through the beginning, middle, and end of your vampire’s existence. For example, all the earliest prompts deal with experiences becoming a vampire while those in the 70s are how you meet your demise.

These are writing or thinking prompts, very open-ended. For example, prompt number one reads;

“In your blood-hunger you destroy someone close to you. Kill a mortal Character. Create one if none are available. Take the skill Bloodthirsty.”

From this you decide who the victim is, how exactly the death occurs, how this effects your character, etc. Since you start the game with mortal characters you created as part of the background, this might involve the trauma of killing someone who was part of your human existence.

Later, you encounter prompt number sixteen which reads;

“Some mortals have banded together to hunt you, well-armed and wise to your tricks. How do you defeat or evade them? Create a mortal hunter related to one of your checked skills. Check a skill.”

Here you would add a new Character to your sheet (the hunter) and check one of your skills to defeat them. You decide to use Bloodthirsty from prompt one, and then to proceed to describe how you do not go after the hunters, but instead hunt down and slaughter everyone dear to them until they are devastated and broken and give up their hunt.

Prompts are randomly determined by rolling a D10 and a D6, and subtracting the latter from the former. You then move forward, or back, to the corresponding prompt. If you land on a prompt a second or third time, extra variations of that prompt at give, the second and third in increasing severity and intensity.

In a quick play game you just answer these prompts, verbally or mentally. In a journaling game you might write an in-character diary entry to describe them, ending up at the end of the game with your very own vampire novella. 

Appendices and Final Thoughts

The appendices are full of extra prompts from various contributors, expanding the game in some very intriguing ways. There are interviews with the author, giving valuable insight into the game’s design, and there are ideas for group play. One involves exchanging letters with other players (or perhaps a shared online document) and having the vampire characters share Resources and Characters…sometimes stealing resources from another, or killing one of their Characters. The vampires of this game are not necessarily the political, clan-based infighting sort seen in the various iterations of Vampire, but they are apex predators who do not play well with rivals.

Which brings me to one of the final points about the game. There is no baked-in mythology here, no setting, not even a timeline (it is called Thousand Year Old Vampire but nothing stops yours from being 5000, or even 500). Does your vampire drink blood? Suck breath? Feed off the life-force of mortal lovers? Devour victims whole? Your Marks allow you to be as weird or unique as you like. The book reminds us that Google is our friend. With a bit of research you can play in any historical period you like, or even into the far future. Again the prompts are more creative writing tools than anything else, so the only practical limit is the players imagination.

But this is not a pretty game. You are running a character that has a mind and will of its own. The prompts will often tell you what your vampire has done, and then leave you to justify it. The central theme of it is loss: yes, the vampire is immortal, but absolutely everything around them rots and is lost to time. A secondary theme is reinvention. Your vampire will often willingly chose to forget their extensive knowledge of medieval heraldry or classical Latin in order to make room for computer programming, automobile driving, and the like. Thus the vampire moves through history, but retains no tangible hold on it. It is a lonely game, a scary game, and yes…an addicting one.

Available in PDF or in Print + PDF form. 

IMAGINATION, POWER, AND THE NECESSITY OF CREATIVE PLAY

Looking down on empty streets, all she can see
Are the dreams all made solid
Are the dreams all made real
All of the buildings, all of those cars
Were once just a dream
In somebody's head

Peter Gabriel, "Mercy Street"

THE ABILITY TO REASON, to draw conclusions from observation and experience, has been crucial to the success of the human species.  Of this there can be little doubt.  But the flip side of reason, the ability to see the world "as it is," is the ability to see the world "as it might be."  This power, imagination, is one of our most extraordinary gifts.  It is not merely the source of our arts and cultures, but our technologies as well.  It lies close to the heart of what makes us--for now, at least--the dominant species on the planet.

Despite its power (or perhaps because of it), imagination tends to make people a bit nervous.  Like magic, a word to which it is related, imagination is at turns dismissed, trivialized, and condemned.  There is a sense that it must be restrained, sanctioned, quarantined.  We chuckle at it in children, but expect them to bridle it in adolescence and enter the "real world" (something I have written about here). We could argue this is due to its mercurial nature; imagination is often erratic and unpredictable, acting as an external muse rather than something we switch on and off like a coffee maker.  Imaginative work is a sort of dance, where the imagination acts as an equal partner rather than a subordinate.  As any artist will tell you, imagination needs to be wined and dined.  It can be controlled, but doing so cripples and eventually withers it.  To really let imagination do its thing, you have to be willing to let go. But most people only feel comfortable engaging with imagination in a limited, controlled way--such as by reading a novel, playing a video game, or watching a television program.  Actually unleashing it and allowing oneself to be carried away is usually left to artists...widely considered an odd bunch to begin with.

It's unfortunate that such attitudes exist, that people are afraid of letting their imaginations "run away with them."  It is also completely understandable.  At issue here is the nature of "power," and of society's attitudes towards it.

The beginning of despair lies in being unable to imagine anything better.  That leads to surrender.

There is a deep misunderstanding of what "power" is.  The word comes to us via French from the Latin potis, "to be able, capable," and is cousin to the English words potential and possibile.  There is a hint to its identity in this.  While we are generally taught that power is synonymous with "control," as in power "over" something, true power is the capacity to do and more importantly to create.  On some level we all understand this; Abrahamic faiths often refer to God, the Supreme Power, as the "Creator," and few aspects of human existence are treated with as much awe and sanctity as the power to create new human life.  Paradoxically we look askew at imaginative power, the power to create new ideas.  Indeed, it has often been said that the tragedies of history all stem from a lack of imagination.  It goes back to the obsession with control, and the desire by societies to control, regulate, and dictate the ideas that make up that particular culture.  When we talk about dictators wanting to control what people think, what we are really saying is that authoritarians want to control what people can imagine.  The beginning of despair lies in being unable to imagine anything better.  That leads to surrender.  In the interest of keeping control, those at the top of a society must limit the populace's ability to dream.

So very few of us then allow ourselves the experience of imagination as creative play.  This is tragic, because the imagination--like a muscle--only grows stronger with use.  Many of the same activities that lead to weakness of the body simultaneously lead to weakness of the imagination.  Sitting passively watching the latest big budget superhero film, the new season of Game of Thrones, or playing the most recent release of a favorite video game all seem to be exercises in imagination, but in reality these are mediums where all the imagining has already been done for you.  This benefits both authority and the entertainment industry--which like a drug dealer makes the public dependent on its product for "escape"--but does little to benefit the individual.  This is especially pernicious for children.  Where once they went outside to run and play, making up their own adventures and stories, today they remain indoors spoon-fed someone else's.

We end up in a situation, then, where people require re-education to do what should be completely natural for them.  No, not everyone should have equal imaginative capabilities, any more than we should all be able to lift the same amount or run just as fast, but we should all know at least how to sit down and make up stories, close our eyes and visualize, or engage in creative play without feeling self conscious about it.  Even reading--which like sex or dance is a creative pairing between two individuals, one providing the words and the other painting the images in his or her head--is becoming less common these days.  I have no doubt that this deterioration of imagination lies at the heart of many of the political movements we see these days, and I feel strongly enough about this to write an entire blog about it. 

...the key to a better life, for oneself, one's family, one's society, lies first in the ability to imagine one.

The connective tissue in all that I discuss here is imagination as creative play, a guilty pleasure that so many people have been taught to keep away from.  But the key to a better life, for oneself, one's family, one's society, lies first in the ability to imagine one.  This is the Promethean theft of fire from the gods.  It is the mercurial and awe inspiring heart of true magic. The first step in attaining this power is to allow oneself to go against oppressive norms and prohibitions intended to stifle it.  The road to freedom begins with allowing oneself to engage in the simple magic of childhood, to give oneself time to play.        

    

THE LOOKING GLASS

Let's get our definitions out-of-the-way first;

Objective universe: the part of existence which can be sensed and quantified. It is the mechanical/organic cosmic order characterized by its regularity and predictability, by the presence of laws.

Subjective universe: the "world" of any sentient entity within the universe. There are as many subjective universes as there are sentient beings, each is the particularized manifestation of consciousness within the universe.

THE FIRST THING you learn as a magician is that there are two worlds, the one of the senses, and the one inside our heads. The second thing you learn, is that a great deal of mischief arises from confusing the two planes. Uber magician Aleister Crowley, once warned his students before beginning on any magical curriculum;

1. This book is very easy to misunderstand; readers are asked to use the most minute critical care in the study of it, even as we have done in its preparation.

2. In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.

I have often thought a similar warning should preface the Bible.

Because "objective reality" and "philosophic validity" is exactly what too many religious people ascribe to the gods and spirits in their respective religions. Over the years, I have met people ready to attest to the palpable presence of Allah in their lives, or the Buddha, or Krishna, or Jesus Christ. And I believe them; I have no doubt that these entities are absolutely real for them. But this is where I always remember Crowley's warning. Just because they are real for them in their subjective universe does not mean they exist as objective realities, and more harm than good arises from believing that they do.

But this is also the mistake that atheists and positivists make. Simply because your microscope tells you differently, doesn't mean that Communion doesn't really become flesh and blood. It does; but inside the confines of the subjective universe. All the gods that ever were are totally real, even if they did not leave a shred of DNA evidence behind. And yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. They exist on a separate frequency from the material, the same frequency that the imagination vibrates upon.

Which does not in any way make them less real than a virus, or gravity. Make no mistake; ideas too can kill. This is the third thing that every magician must learn to understand; that the boundaries between the objective and subjective universes can be crossed. Alice can pass through the Looking Glass, but so too can the Red Queen.

We all know this but we forget. Objective experiences become memories, thoughts, and impressions all the time everyday of our lives. The subjective universe is a mirror that reflects images of the objective world. But it is also so much more than that, and that is the gift of being human. The reason that magic is classified as an "art" is because it takes something born in the subjective world and moves it into the objective. Like all arts, both fine and industrial, it is all about taking an idea and using it to reshape the objective world. It is about turning the mirror around so that the objective world reflects the subjective. This is why, of course, it is ridiculous to dismiss subjective realities as simply delusions or dreams. Too often they escape the confines of their cages and rampage around the "real" world.

As a magician my purpose is to go deep into the subjective world and summon things out of it. This dovetails nicely with my work as a writer. But that's nothing new; the connection between the Word and magic is deep and ancient. We speak of spells and spellings, grammar and grimoire. And all the old gods of magic--Hermes, Mecury, Odin, Thoth--were patrons of communication too. The spirits conjured by great writers have touched millions; who doesn't know Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, or Ebeneezer Scrooge? They move invisibly around us, occasionally seizing possession of actors, not unlike the loa of voudon. All writers--and artists--are magicians, and vice versa.

And here is where we come to the point.

The secret that magicians possess, the one that positivists and theologians lack, is that the objective reality of the spirits we conjure is wholly irrelevant; what matters is their ability to effect the world. Just as the identity of light as photons or waves changes with perspective, so too does the reality of gods and spirits depending on whether your vantage point is in the objective or subjective world. Theists and atheists will squabble endlessly over the existence of God, but the magician knows they are both correct. Further, he is more interested in how "God" effects things than proving or disproving him, just as with any other subjective being. And in the end this might be the greatest point of contention between magic and religion; the magician is concerned with what the gods can do for us, not what we can do for them. This is why it is impossible for me to bow down and worship a god; I am by extension bowing down to the magician who conjured it, and whether his "spell" is meant to control who I sleep with or to persuade me to fly an airplane into a skyscraper, I would be a poor magician indeed to fall under it. I am, however, entitled to listen to the gods conjured by other people. Jesus of Nazareth does not need to be the Lord and Savior of my own subjective universe for me to give him an ear. As a magician, I am free to listen to and to learn from any god, spirit, or devil and weigh what they have to say equally.

Which brings me to the fourth and final secret that being a magician has taught me; the definition of what a "spirit" is. It is more than just the personification of a phenomenon, it is the imposition of meaning on phenomena. We know this when we talk about the "spirit" as opposed to the "letter" of something, or the "spirit" of how it was intended. The objective universe is completely devoid of meaning; it just "is." But our inner subjective worlds are fraught with meaning, bursting with it. Magic, and art, are struggles to bridge the two worlds and infuse our lives with meaning, with spirit, but to be fully aware that we are the ones doing the defining. We must avoid the Scylla and Charybdis of accepting that life is meaningless or that it comes already defined. It is our job to do magic, to transmute lead into gold, and to give meaning to our own existences. That is the greatest magic there is.

Since I began with Aleister, I would like to finish with him as well.  

"...WHY should you study and practice Magick (sic)?  Because you can't help doing it, and you had better do it well than badly."

WRITERS, SHAMANS, AND FOOLS

master shaman, i have come

with my dolly from the shadow side

with a demon and an englishman

Tori Amos, "Sister Janet"

Once upon a time, long ago, I knew this strange kid. His family moved around every year, and he was perpetually the "new kid" in school, reluctant to make strong attachments he knew would be broken before the end of the year. Despite this, he was never really lonely. He had friends no one else could see.

He would wander, often, into the desert; there amidst the scorpions and rattlesnakes the dust would whisper to him, and he heard voices in the wind. The ghosts of long dead Native peoples would tell him their stories. The sun and stars sang to him tales of long ago. A little bit older, his family resettled back east, and the wooded landscape of rural New York was so very different from the one he had grown up in. Still, he would often disappear for hours to wander lost in the mountains, returning from such meanderings starry-eyed, dazed, and slightly out of it. But it wasn't chemicals secretly getting him high. He was just out talking to the trees.

Then of course his family did the worst possible thing you could do with a kid like that. They gave him an old manual typewriter. And parents--let this be a warning to you. If you are concerned about your children dabbling in occult forces, don't worry about the ouija board or the Tarot cards. Whatever you do, keep them away from pens and paper and keyboards. Take away their paint brushes and their clay. Because after they gave the boy his keyboard, he no longer went out to the spirits.

The spirits now came to him.

I have often felt, when I sit down to write, that I should be beating a medicine drum, drawing chalk circles, or chanting invocations. Like any shaman, I am preparing for an out-of-body experience, a journey to the Otherside. My spirit leaves my body and flows through the clicking of the keyboard, channeled to some nether realm where the voices come and tell me their stories. I can lose hours, skip meals, forget to sleep. Screw heroin, alcohol, or sex. No one fully understands addiction the way people compelled to create do.

At times I feel certain there must be some grand celestial waiting room out there, where all the unwritten songs, the unimagined paintings, and the untold tales are all lined up waiting for some poor fool to pick up a pencil and let them out. They are there, whispering, scratching at the walls of reality, waiting to be born. "Come get me. Let me out." Because inasmuch as people concerned with commercial success will tell you something inane like "write what you know," the best stories--the real stories--just come through. They almost seem to be using you as a passage into the world. I won a playwright's competition when I was 17, and I remember the director asking me if I had personally experienced the events in the tale. I hadn't. I didn't know anyone who had. And I had no flipping clue where it came from. All I knew was that an English teacher knew I liked to write, challenged me to enter the competition, and I sat down to knock off a story. There was no plotting. No scripting. No laying out scenes. The voices just started whispering.

I am not a writer. I am a secretary who takes dictation from the ghosts in his head. And thus it is rather difficult for me to be lonely, or to even imagine what lonely feels like. Like any medium, I am not looking to fill the silence, but instead looking for silence where and when I can.

THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE

One of the books I re-read religiously every couple of years, to remind myself why I write and what a good scary story is supposed to look like, is a slim little volume that packs in a ton of horror. The author needs no apology from me; she has been a staple of American literature since the mid-20th century, and her superb The Lottery pops up in high school and freshman English courses everywhere. She is of course, Shirley Jackson, and The Haunting of Hill House is her masterpiece.

With all due respect to Henry James and The Turn of the Screw, “Hill House” stands as the finest piece of psychological horror ever put to paper. If you can read this book without a racing pulse, you might be dead. There are no monsters, no real violence, no gore-splattered scenes to speak of. And yet Ms. Jackson is terrifying. There are sections of the book that—despite years of readings—still trigger my fear factor.

The premise is simple, recalling the ghost-hunting tales of the late 19th century. Anthropologist and parapsychologist Dr. Montague is conducting research into hauntings, and to do so has invited a handful of people to spend the summer with him in Hill House. Luke Sanders is a gambler, womanizer, and all-around cad whose family happens to own the place. Theodora is an artist, psychic, and (subtlely hinted at in this 1959 novel) a lesbian with a quiet cruel streak. And then there is Eleanor, a young woman who spent all of her adult life caring for an invalid mother, a shy introvert who dreams of a happy ending to her rather miserable life. As a girl, following her father’s death, it rained stones on Eleanor’s house for three days and nights. Montague invited her—as with Theodora—because her life as been touched by the psychic and he hopes to provoke Hill House into a response.

Hill House. Though Montague refers to it as “the Mount Everest of haunted houses” it doesn’t seem to be that haunted at all. There are no floating skulls, wandering apparitions, rattling chains. Though a large and rambling Victorian mansion, it remains fairly attractive; “within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut.” It is neither in decay nor in ruin. And yet Hill House is without question,wrong. Its architect made sure the angles were all off, 88 or 92 degrees rather than the logical 90. Doors are imperceptibly angled and set to close themselves. Everything is just a fraction off, creating a disorienting effect. People can and do get lost in Hill House.

They also die there in alarming numbers. The number of accidents, break-downs, and suicides in Hill House is on the extreme high end of the bell curve. At the stunning climax of the novel, one of the characters simultaneously suffers all three.

Jackson’s influence on other writers of the haunted house tale is profound and well-acknowledged, but no one has quite seemed to match the slow, quiet, and intense pressure of her novel. Ironically, a few films have come close; Kubrick’s The Shining and the original Robert Wise film version of “Hill House,” called simply The Haunting, came close (avoid however the terrible Liam Neeson/Catherine Zeta-Jones remake of ten years ago). Few writers—myself included—demonstrate Jackson’s remarkable restraint. There is not a single page in this story which goes over-the-top. Jackson hints, whispers, and occassional shouts “boo,” but never once descends into B-Movie tactics. Hill House, to borrow a phrase from Mr. John Tynes, is the equivalent of mental plutonium. Its invisible radiations sicken and poison the mind by mere exposure, unseen and unnoticed until it is too late. As the characters slowly break-down, the reader goes with them, and is forced to fight Ms. Jackson’s undertow.

I have been exploring the first few nooks and crannies of my own haunted house novel, something I have always wanted to tackle but never quite got around to. As I read The Haunting of Hill House again, I felt my nerve slightly fail. It would be impossible to write anything better than Jackson’s novel; one’s only choice is to try to do something different. “Hill House” has stood for fifty years as the apex of the haunted house tale, and is unlikely to ever be dethroned. And so, gentle reader, I leave you with the closing paragraph of that book;

...Hill House, not sane, stood against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, its walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

"HOUSE OF LEAVES"

I can't stand "genre" fiction. The best stories--the greatest stories--defy being placed in just a single Barnes & Noble category. Calling The Lord of the Rings"fantasy," The Haunting of Hill House "horror," or Watchmen a "comic book" is lovely for marketing, because it allows a whole horde of less talented writers to come along and blindly ape such works for mass consumption. But it also spectacularly misses the point. Tolkien's decades-long experiment in cultural philology and linguistics is a very different animal from the likes of Terry Brooks, who has made a career of stealing Tolkien's most superficial elements and recycling them. Likewise, "graphic novels" are now an entire cottage industry as people try to recreate the bleak realism of Moore's masterpiece. But in my humble opinion (wait, screw the "humble" part), if an author sits down to write a "vampire" novel or a "fantasy" novel or a "romance" novel, he or she is already a hack. A writer is in the business of telling stories, and must remain true to the story no matter how many genres it meanders through.

House of Leaves is one of those rare first novels that managed to get published despite A) wandering through more genres than you could shake a stick at, and B) breaking absolutely all the conventions of what "sells." It is mad, impossible, daunting, distancing, utterly gripping, and sheer genius. I haven't seen an author with balls this size since Eco.

In a nutshell, the entire book is a scholarly dissection of the cult film The Navidson Record,containing hundreds (possibly thousands) of footnotes and references. Except of course, that it was all written by a blind madman, there never was a film called The Navidson Record,and the entire mess was edited by another man who went mad in the process. With me so far?

According to Zampano, the blind man who spent decades piecing the book together, The Navidson Record was a sort of Blair Witch documentary that came about when Pulitzer prize winning photojournalist Will Navidson and his parter Karen purchased and moved into a colonial Virgina farmhouse. This house, they soon discovered, was wrong. But if you think you've heard this one before, you haven't. The family doesn't have to deal with ghosts or bleeding walls. Instead, a hallway appears overnight that literally goes nowhere. Black, freezing, and featureless, it opens into an endless series of halls, empty rooms, and stairs...a labyrinth that may or may not contain its own horrific minotaur. Navidson grabs his camera and starts filming, and the labyrinth responds by slowing destroying his world.

Zampano analyzes the film scene by scene, drawing upon a staggering wealth of scholarly opinions by scientists, philosophers, artists, etc. Except of course, the film never existed. When Zampano suddenly and mysteriously dies, this mess of a manuscript passes into the hands of tattoo parlor apprentice Johnny Truant, who becomes increasingly obsessed with it and re-edits the work. Now, as any writer worth his salt will tell you, a first person narrative is always uncertain. The disembodied third-person approach can magically get inside everyone's heads and report the truth, while the first person is one character's impression of the truth. Imagine thenHouse of Leaves, a first person narrative of a first person narrative of another first person narrative. But then again, the idea of the "echo" is essential to the book.

The book manages to tell a page-turning, gripping story that leads the reader, like Ariadne's thread, through a maze of horror, fantasy, and philosophy before discovering the whole thing is a love story. Sort of. Not really.

What becomes clear as you read House of Leaves is that the manuscript itself is the real labyrinth, and that if you read too deep, too far, and too long, the Minotaur will find you. The book understands that the true antagonist in any tale is not the villain or the monster, but the narrative itself. Think about that too long and like Johnny Truant you will go mad.

It is cliche to say "you've never read a book like this before," but you haven't. Really. Never. And if you don't believe me, sift through the 663 other reads saying the same damn thing here; If you are a reader, you would do yourself a disservice buy not grabbing this book.

IT'S LIKE "TWILIGHT," FOR PEOPLE WITH BRAINS

The middle of the last decade saw the publication of an extraordinary debut novel. Moving, disturbing, and strangely uplifting, it told the improbable tale of emerging love between an adolescent and a vampire. It rocketed to the top of the bestseller list and was soon the basis for an equally amazing film (Rotten Tomatoes rated it 97% Fresh). No, we are definitely NOT talking about Stephanie Myers or Twilight. The book in question is Lat Den Ratte Komma In by Swedish novelist John Ajvide Lindqvist.

Let The Right One In (its English title, taken from Morrisey's "Let the Right One Slip In," is a play on the old vampire tradition of having to invite them in) tells the tale of 12-year-old Oskar. The child of a broken home, he lives in a state apartment housing complex with his mother. Slightly overweight, ostracized and horrifically bullied, the daily abuse by his peers has given him the unpleasant habit of constantly wetting his pants. Worse, he has begun to fantasize about sticking a knife in his tormentors, stealing a hunting knife from a local sporting goods store to stab at trees in the woods, imagining their faces, hurling back the taunts usually yelled at him. He is a boy dangerously about to break, the one Pearl Jam wrote about in Jeremy, the kind of monster manufactured in schools every day.

Enter the new girl, Eli. She and her "father" move into the unit next door to Oskar, but are almost never seen. The windows are covered up, and despite also being 12 the girl doesn't seem to attend school. Oskar, whose habit is to sit alone on the communal play ground in the evenings, encounters her there. Despite the brutal Swedish winter she is barefoot and in a thin pink sweater. Her hair is matted and filthy. She smells bad. She tells him she can't be his friend. And yet his loneliness is reflected in her own, drawing them slowly together. Night after night they meet on the playground, pretending they aren't happy to see the other there.

Then Oskar suffers an particularly brutal assault, whipped by a pack of boys with switches. One blow cuts open his cheek. That night, when he meets Eli, the following transpires;

...she touched his wound and (a) strange thing happened. Someone else, someone much older, became visible under her skin. A cold shiver ran down Oskar's back, as if he had bitten into an ice cream.

"Oskar. Don't let them do it. Do you hear me? Don't let them."

"...No."

"You have to strike back. You've never done that, have you?"

"No."

"So start now. Hit them back. Hard."

"There's three of them."

"Then you have to hit harder. Use a weapon."

"Yes."

"Stones. Sticks. Hit them more than you really dare. Then they'll stop."

"Yes, but what if they..."

"Then I will help you."

"You? But you are..."

"I can do it, Oskar. That ...is something I can do."

Indeed she can. Eli is 200 hundred years old, a vampire trapped in the body of a little girl. The man taking care of her is, sickeningly, a pedophile she snared and forces to watch over her by day. Oskar is the first person to be kind to her in decades, and despite herself and the danger to herself, the exposure, she helps him.

Let the Right One In pulls absolutely no punches. Twilight, written roughly the same time and with a very similar premise, is by comparison comfort food, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. WhereTwilight is fastidiously careful not to challenge or offend, to tell you that beautiful people really do have souls and that abstinence really is the best policy until you graduate from school, Let the Right One In has teeth. Its protagonists are not faux outsiders who both mysteriously look like models, but rough, untidy, unclean. Both of them, including Eli, are pathetic and powerfully human. They fall in love (for anyone who remembers junior high school) in a fumbling, awkward, uncomfortable way, drawn together because no one else would want them.

Make no mistake, the novel terrifies to a degree that Myers' work never comes near, but at the same time Let the Right One In is deeply tragic. It leads, unlike Bella and Edward, are not leads in the ballet version of Romeo & Juliet, but nevertheless far more compelling.

The novel--a bestseller across Europe--is readily available in English. The 2007 film version, equally superb, is also easy to find. The 2010 American version, Let Me In, is surprisingly excellent as well.

ZOMBIES: THE OTHER 99 PERCENT

When you write horror fiction, you pay attention to the trends. These days, you can’t swing a baseball bat (or chainsaw) without hitting a mindless, shuffling, canibalistic corpse. Zombies have taken over the Earth, threatening the monopoly vampires have held over the undead market for 100 years.

It’s a little like Occupy Wall Street.

When it comes right down to it, since the 19^th century vampires have been a metaphor for the 1%. Wealthy, parasitic nobles that live off of the “lower” classes. They live in castles, are clad in evening wear, stay ever young and have sneering—if impeccable—manners. Oh sure, we can talk about how much the myth has changed, and argue that Eric Northman and Edward Cullen are a long way from Count Dracula, but they aren’t, really. Just look at the house Edward lives in. How many people could afford that? And his dad is a doctor.

Zombies, however, are very much the 99%. This was true even before George Romero sank his teeth into them. Zombies started out, originally, a form of slave or forced labor. An evil sorceror stole someone’s soul and forced them to obey his every command. Though we’ve all worked for bosses like that, it doesn’t take a genius to see the parallels to African slavery that spawned the myth in Haiti. Romero seized this idea and ran with it in his various Living Dead films. The zombie went from being a proper slave to a “wage slave” as Romero remade them into a metaphor for mindless consumerism and the depersonalization of capitalist society. Suddenly zombies were infectious and worse, hungry. They swarmed shopping malls mindlessly eating and making new zombies. It doesn’t take a genius to see the metaphor in that, either.

The zombie has come to embody the poor, the homeless, the unemployed. They are the mob that comes in waves to steal your life away from you. When Herman Cain talks about electrifying the border fence between Mexico and America, about a half-dozen zombie films immediately jump to mind.

We talk about migrant workers like they are zombies. Fox News talks about Occupy Wall street like they are (“mindless,” unfocused,” “mob,” and “dangerous” have all been terms the fair and balanced network used). There are politicians (like Cain again), who talk about the sweeling ranks of the unemployed like they are a zombie threat. And do I have news for you…they are.

Because inherent in the modern zombie is this threat of society going to pieces, of the mob taking over. Vampires have done so well the last century, especially in America, because it is a lot of people’s dream to “ascend” to that 1%. This is why with all the bloody vampire films out there, so few of them are actually horror (and the ones that are usually depict one of the aristocratic and noble 1% swooping in to seduce the working class hero’s girlfriend). Nobody, by contrast, wants to end up a zombie. But the curious thing about horror is that it exorcises our fears, and the more we fear becoming a zombie, the more the myth will fascinate. The implicit message in zombie films is that we all are just a bite—or a pink slip—away from joining the horde.

Right now, that scares the crap out of people.

And so, as we watch the news and see hordes of hungry and often violent mobs forming across the globe, rampaging, just keep telling yourself there is no such thing as zombies.

Good luck with that.

THIS ROUGH MAGIC

"We are quicksilver, a fleeting shadow, a distant sound... our home has no boundaries beyond which we cannot pass. We live in music, in a flash of color... we live on the wind and in the sparkle of a star! ...And you want to trade it all for a quarter of an acre of crabgrass."

- Endora to Samantha, Bewitched

I started writing when I was ten, and by the sixth grade was reading my stories aloud to the class. By sixteen I'd written two novels--neither was very good, but they showed enough promise to get some attention. At seventeen I won the New York State Young Playwright's Contest, and the next year won it again. So by the time I went to university, everyone expected me to major in English. But there was only one problem with that. Creative writing classes and literary criticism make me cringe.

When someone starts talking to me about plots, character arcs, and motivations I recoil like Bela Lugosi did from the crucifix. For me, at least, stories are not car engines that can be broken down, analyzed, and reproduced. Storytelling isn't a science, it's an art, and the characters that inhabit them are not little robots designed to serve a function, but beings evoked from somewhere else. Writers, like the coccyx or the appendix, are the vestiges of a more ancient phenomenon. They are the modern shamans; odd, half-mad people who cross over the the Otherworld, traffic with spirits, and bring back something to share with the tribe.

Alan Moore (From Hell, Watchmen, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, etc), who is a practicing ritual magician as well as a writer, pointed out in the conclusion of his epic Promethea that language and magic are intimately intertwined. We cast spells and have spelling, poetry talks about invocation and evocation just like conjuring spirits does, and the traditional magic book of wizards--the grimoire--is linguistically related to the word grammar. We cannot think coherently without language, which at its core is about shaping the world around and inside us. This makes it a quite magical thing indeed. Having spent the last 25 years practicing magic myself, I see other connections as well. The deepest of these is summoning spirits.

Despite being a magician I consider myself a materialist; I don't believe that spirits and other worlds exist in exactly the same way the physical world does. I like to use the analogy of figures in a dream. They may, in fact, be figments of our imagination, but at the same time they seem to exist independent of us. They are the Other, and operate outside our conscious wills. If this wasn't true, nightmares could not frighten us. We'd just tell them to go away. Inside our heads are entire landscapes, multiple unformed realities populated by a legion of beings. Through language, they can sometimes be conjured from their world into our own, where they achieve a kind of half-life. "Hamlet" is distinct from any of the actors who play him, and there is something in acting anyway that resembles possession. "Santa Claus" may not be real the way my neighbor is but he certainly has more power to affect behavior around the world. And don't get me started with "God." These things may--or may not--be conjured up from within the human psyche, but it is a mistake to think they are not feisty, independent, or real.

For me, putting characters on paper then is no different from conjuring elementals or Enochian angels. I think this is what the Greeks meant when they discussed Muses. I don't necessarily see myself as making up characters and stories, so much as I cross over into some deep place and discover them. I go over to the Otherside and bring something back. This is also why Hermes--the Roman Mercury--was the god of magicians as well as of communication and crossing between this world and the next (he was also the patron of liars, con men, and thieves, but those are just storytellers who use their power for evil).

There is something miraculous, mystical, and fantastic about a good story. The characters seem real. I know for myself, at least, that I cannot really force them to do anything. Rather, they follow their own courses, make their own choices, and I scribble down what paths they chose. When people ask me to make changes to a story, my standard response is "don't tell me, take it up with them." I enjoy the magic of the process, and resorting to what they teach you in Creative Writing 101 feels a bit like trading quicksilver for that quarter acre of crabgrass.