2 Book Lovers Reviews
Thomas S. Flowers - October 13th, 2015
October Month of Horror - Guest Post
More Books by Thomas S. Flowers
The Monster Inside Me sounds almost parasitic, right? Like a worm eating away the inside things, the guts, lungs, tissue, bone —heart. The inside monster also calls attention to the duality of man, or how those Jungian scribes say, the subterranean cellar for symbols, myths and fairy tales that represent inherited patterns of thought, our interconnected selves through history and lore. When the monster within becomes a shadowy thing, a part of the undiscovered self, or maybe to put it more sharply, the ignored self, this lack of awareness of our dualistic nature and our inner contrasts tend to lead us down dark and unimaginable eldritch roads of wanton outbursts, destruction, and hate. The greatest example of this in our modern age, would be the Nazis and the Holocaust that superseded at the cusp of their power, like a snake eating its own tail. The ignorance of one’s inner monster or duality completes the tragic irony of humanity and consumes it wholly. The Holocaust also shows us that modernity is not capable of greater demonstrations of evil than antiquity, but rather the means for proclivity and the scale of consequence have broadened and differentiated.
So, what does all this psychoanalytical gribble have to do with horror?
I’ll glad you asked.
Horror is so much more than movies or books. The roots of horror stem back to our evolutionary instinct, that tickle on your spine when you’re home alone in the basement of your house and you’ve got that funny feeling something bulbous is watching you from the dark places you cannot see. This instinctual fear of the unknown, the greatest and oldest fear, according to H.P. Lovecraft, has been expressed through the eons, first as painted depictions of giant snakes or birds of prey or large cats on the caves of the Paleolithic Era and then into folklore and oratory tradition and finally into works of script. Horror not only bubbles up from the caldrons of our collective memory (history), but horror also plays on our cultural anxieties. In this way, horror becomes the most natural form of social commentary. Consider the 1954 film, Godzilla, released nine years after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, its depiction of a giant lizard, awakened by nuclear testing, ruthlessly attacking Tokyo must have been deeply terrifying to those who had come face to face with the devastation of nuclear warfare. Or maybe there was a deeper subversive meaning to the film, a reminder of Isoroku Yamamoto’s infamous quote after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the eventual dawn of the Atomic Age, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant…” When we think about that Monster Inside Me and how the denial of our duality can lead to horrifying conclusions (Holocaust, Atomic Age), we must also think about how we can shine a light on those inner-demons.
ENTER HORROR!
We can use horror as a method of illuminating those dark corners of the human condition. Generally, horror storytelling seeks not to explicitly state a specific opinion or moral, but to force the subconscious fears of the audience to the surface, in order for them to form their own conclusions. Depending on the storyteller, one hand can be heavier than the other, this goes without saying. Some stories are blatantly obvious in what’s going on behind the curtain. Others are more hidden. This can be good or bad depending on the artistic style or representation. If you’re watching satire, for instance, you’ll be subjected with an exaggeration of “fear” in order to expose whatever issue, political or otherwise, in which that works day and age is attempting to address. Consider Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho as an excellent example of satirized horror, depicting a twisted view on upper-class living searching aimlessly for something in a world where everything is handed to them. In the case of Pat Bateman, murder becomes his form of escape and it is treated just as banal as deciding on what designer suit to wear out to the club. Consider also Clive Barker’s mythical work, Cabal, as a more subtle approach to bringing out those hidden inner fears and perhaps desires as well, discussing behind the curtain of Boone and the Night Breed, the subconscious is fundamentally addressing homosexuality and otherness contrasted against the fears in that story’s day and age. Similar, some might say, in the way James Whale depicted the Frankenstein monster, feared because of its difference, but is also pitied because of the fate that has befallen it.
Writing about The Monster Inside Me is an objective pursuit in understanding our dualistic nature, and as Jung often put, our collective history. Good horror storytelling doesn’t give the audience the answers; rather, forces the question. Horror in the guise of entertainment, presenting itself as some unholy creature or alien is essentially discussing humanity itself. And this is why I write horror, not only to (hopefully) entertain, but to also add something to our collective understanding of self. Identify current trends and societal fears and anxieties. With the release of my debut novel, REINHEIT, I used our collective history and memory of the Holocaust and the Einsatzgruppen to discuss the cultural fears of immigration, and on a baser level, to (also hopefully) open the subconscious of my audience to the dangers of pseudospeciation and ethnocentrism. In the end, we are forced to address what the cost of hate is. How far will it take us? Can we ever come back? And so on.
About Thomas S. Flowers
Thomas S Flowers was born in Walter Reed Medical Center, Maryland to a military family. He grew up in RAF Chicksands, England and then later Fort Meade, and finally Roanoke, Virginia. Thomas graduated high school in 2000 and on September 11, 2001, joined the U.S. Army. From 2001-2008, Thomas served in the military police corps, with one tour in South Korea and three tours serving in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. While stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, between deployments, Thomas met his wife and following his third and final tour to Iraq, decided decided to rejoin the civilian ranks. Thomas was discharged honorably in February 2008 and moved to Houston, Texas where he found employment and attended night school. In 2014, Thomas graduated with a Bachelor in Arts in History from University of Houston-Clear Lake. Thomas blogs at www.machinemean.org, commenting and reviewing movies, books, shows, and historical content. Thomas is living a rather simple and quite life with his beautiful bride and amazing daughter, just south of Houston, Texas.
2 Book Lovers Reviews
© Copyright | Privacy Policy
2 Book Lovers Reviews