TTH 5 gr A

The Mist, S. King, 1985

Summary :  the action takes place near a lake somewhere in rural America. There's a family of three, the narrator, his wife Steff and their 5 year old son Billy. There's a "heat wave" that is about to provoke a "vicious thunderstorm." It's a late afternoon, and everything seems still and quiet.

Characterization : S. King uses a very familiar context that the reader can recognize very easily. Likewise, the characters are likeable and can be immediately identified with. For example, the sentence "Billy is five," introducing that character, emphasizes the nature of who Billy is, and his fictional potential. 

Here, there's a different tradition of horror writing at work : instead of beginning the tale in media res, with horrific events right from the start, S. King chooses to take his time and give the reader an opportunity to discover a familiar context. This daily life (routine?) will be smashed at some point by evil forces.

 

Strangers, D. Koontz, 1986

Summary : The character wakes up in his dark closet, he has been sleepwalking. We learn he is a writer, he's single, and he's not afraid of the situation, but "embarassed."

Characterization : the first two words are the name of the main character. Unlike The Mist, Strangers is a third person narrative. D. Koontz is famous for being a formulaic author : he always tend to follow the same ideas in most of his novels. He is also a representative of materialistic horror, just like H.P. Lovecraft : they write stories where all the fantastic elements have a rational explanation (science has not just found about it yet).

The Hellbound Heart, C. Barker, 1986

Summary :  It's about a man who has a puzzle box, he bought it somewhere. At the beginning he doesn't have a solution for it, but in the end, and after many hours, he manages to open it. When the box opens there's a little music coming out of it.

Characterization : we're given some names, Lemarchand (the boxmaker) and Frank. We know that Frank likes to solve puzzles, and that he's a bit of a traveller. He's also curious and determined. Coincidentally he's also one of the villains in the story.

The box could also be considered as a full-fledged character (un personnage à part entière) : it's "perverse" and its music is "sublime," connecting it to Poe and to the Gothic tradition. It has a French and Chinese origin. It's also mysterious and mirror-like on the inside, just like the story itself.

The Town Manager, T. Ligotti, 2003

Summary : this story is about a town manager who disappears one morning . He works in an office on "Main Street." After that, a man called Carnes wants to look for him, probably with the narrator and others.

Characterization : Here, the eponymous character (le personnage éponyme) is introduced with THE, which conveys the feeling that he already know him. The story starts in media res. Likewise, the plot revolves around "Main Street," which could be anywhere in time and space. Finally, this is a first person plural narrative, distorting the traditional first person narrative famously used by Poe.

To put it in a nutshell, Poe has influenced many (if not all - si ce n'est tous) of these writers, because his stories didn't rely only on external horror (people coming back from the dead, dismemberment or other gruesome descriptions), but mostly on internal horror, with narrators doubting their mental health (FHU) or being scared by an old man's eye (TTH). Poe has transcended the Gothic genre by exploring the inner life of his characters. It's no coincidence if he fascinated psychotherapists and Freudian theorists like Marie Bonaparte.