Jack Ketchum's Red

I had one of those rare afternoons when I sat down with a novel and finished it in one sitting yesterday. Jack Ketchum's Red (2002) isn't a long novel, checking in at just over 200 pages, but it's a very successful one.

Ketchum is regarded as a pioneer of the splatterpunk movement and, to be sure, his novel Off Season is not for the faint of heart. But, like most of my favorite writers, that reputation is only one small part of a much greater skill set. Red, a textured novel of loss and revenge, is an exceptional example of capturing that most elusive of literary elements: sustenance of tone.

Effective literature (work that achieves a totality of impact across the fields of characterization, symbolism, theme, structure, style and tone) is provocative and complex.

Red certainly falls into that category. I mentioned the thumbnail synopsis to my wife last night (a man's dog is killed out of pure meanness by a group of local teenagers; revenge ensues) and we had a little chat about the "right" kind of revenge.

It's an interesting question--is seeking revenge ethical? Is it satisfactory? Does it grant catharsis?

In the case of Avery (Av) Ludlow, revenge is a window on the nature of his own loss and grief. Ludlow is a wonderful character--three dimensional and deep enough to help readers understand their own motivations if they were faced with a similar situation.

And in terms of tone--that nebulous "feel" that embodies emotion and place while advancing plot and character--this one is superb. Ketchum sketches life in small-town New England in vibrant strokes:

The dog had been a good dog. A damn good dog. His body was still warm.

He got up and closed and locked his tackle box and set his rig, picked them up along with the cooler and walked back to where the dog lay. He tied the arms of his shirt around the dog's neck against the seep of blood and picked him up and tucked him under one arm with the rig and cooler and tackle box all gripped in his other hand and then he started up the path.

The dog grew very heavy.

He had to stop twice to rest but he would not let go of the dog, only sat by the side of the path and put down the cooler and fishing gear and shifted the weight of the dog so that it rested in his lap across his knees, holding him in his arms until he was rested, smelling the familiar scent of his fur and the new smell of his blood.

The second time he stopped he cried at last for the loss of him and for their long fine past together and pounded with his fist at the hardscrabble earth that brought them here.

And then he went on.

Ketchum's prose is spare and precise; the fishing scene is perfectly rendered. He manages, on this smallish canvas, to fully explore the nature of loss and the various transitions of aging. But again, this one boils down to tone, which is one of sincerity.

Some stories meander, and that's okay on occasion, but as a reader I think remarkable books deserve that modifier because they deliver a sustained artistic vision.

Red is that kind of book...

Writing Theory: Drafting Compelling Dialogue

Editors and graduate students (often one and the same, when you're submitting to collegiate journals) love to espouse the advice show, don't tell. This is largely a function of creating authentic dialogue. Of course, it also means avoiding the dreaded information dump as much as is practical, and every rule should be taken with a grain of salt.

Many of my favorite writers do an awful lot of telling, and the work is certainly none the worse for it.

But to discuss today's topic of dialogue, I'll start with advice taken from one of my favorite resources, Strunk and White's The Elements of Style.

Page 75, Section 11:

It is seldom advisable to tell all. Be sparing, for instance, in the use of adverbs after "he said," "she replied," and the like: "he said consolingly"; "she replied grumblingly." Let the conversation itself disclose the speaker's manner or condition.

The authors go on to call dialogue heavily peppered with adverbs "cluttery and annoying," which is certainly not the desired effect you want with your work. In On Writing, Stephen King takes the adverb culling a step further, advising authors to use a chainsaw when cutting these terms from your work in progress.

Good advice, I think.

Page 76, Section 13:

Dialogue is a total loss unless you indicate who the speaker is. In long dialogue passages containing no attributives, the reader may become lost and be compelled to go back and reread in order to puzzle things out. Obscurity is an imposition on the reader, to say nothing of its damage to the work.

Place attributives...where the break would come naturally in speech--that is, where the speaker would pause for emphasis, or take a breath. The best test for locating an attributive is to speak the sentence aloud.

This is simple, sound advice. I read every story out loud at least a few times before I send it out on submission. I've found it's the best test for fluidity in my prose, and it does improve the dialogue. Words spoken carry different weight than they do on paper.

When I wrote Wendigo a few years ago, I had longer scenes that often included three or more characters having a talk. It got old doing the he said/she said, and I was curious for some advice on the topic. I attended the First Coast Writer's Festival here in Jacksonville where Steve Berry, a very gracious man and fine writer, gave a talk on crafting the novel. During the Q & A I posed my question. Berry liked the question, saying he'd been waiting to answer that one for some time, and he told me that the trick there is to use mannerisms.

Sally leaned forward. "What do you want from me?"

"Nothing," Jim replied, "I don't want anything at all from you."

I took a class in graduate school on Ray Carver. I can't find the article, but I read an interview once where Carver once said that the attributive "he/she said" is the best bet. It's the most honest. I tend to agree. I'm a "he/she said" guy first and foremost, but I sprinkle in "replied" and "asked" as well. There are a number of others I'll go to also.

And remember, sometimes you can convey mood in the dialogue through the punctuation. I noticed this passage last night in John Connolly's (excellent) novel The Book of Lost Things:

"Fresh meat!" she whispered to herself. "Fresh meat for old Grammer's oven!"

The juxtaposition of the exclamation points with the attributive "she whispered" creates a different effect than merely saying: "Fresh meat!" she hissed. The meaning is fairly uniform, but Connolly's version has a stronger undercurrent of menace and immediacy to it.

One final note. Never, to the best of my knowledge, have I ever used the term "he laughed." It's difficult to speak and laugh at the same time. Try it sometime. I always use:

"Ok, ok," Jim said, laughing.

Or something of that nature--you get the idea. It's a little idiosyncrasy, to be sure, but it makes sense to me.

As an exercise, try writing a short story that's better than 90% dialogue. If you want a model, take a spin through some of Carver's stories in the Vintage edition of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Lots of great examples in there.

Composition Theory -- Thematic Spurts

I've read a pair of remarkable collections this spring: Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things and Joe Hill's 20th Century Ghosts. They're both filled with stories that resonate with the reader long after he or she turns the final page. They both write literate, lyrical stories, eschewing what Monteleone has called the "steaming pile of organs" school of speculative storytelling for subtle chills. And their work has certainly impacted my output in the last few weeks.

I've been writing ghost stories.

Not in the traditional sense, but in the sense that many of my protagonists have internalized a haunting. Whether they're being chased by regret, or guilt, or a rogue voice calling from the margins of the psyche, my recent output (short fiction exclusively) has definitely trended toward the metaphysical.

We often take a ghost tour as a portion of one of the American Literature classes I teach. We study local oral folklore and urban legends, and then we strike out with a tour group to ooh and aah at the buildings that once bore witness to scenes of depravity and sorrow. It's an interesting class because, while the majority of my students don't believe in "ghosts," they almost all admit that places can carry the psychic residue of the things (good or bad) that took place there. It could be a house, or a section of woods or a span of beach. In that sense, they are admitting to a belief in, for lack of a better term, the supernatural.

I've never written serial killer stories. Never written about explicit violence or gone to the well of vampire stories. That's not to say that I won't, because I'm sure I will at some point. But it feels like we often go through spells of sustained thematic composition. You tend to harvest a certain patch of the garden until it feels complete, then you move on and let that land re-charge.

And as Stephen King says in On Writing, one must read a lot to write well. I think that's why the content tends to run in spurts--most often correlating pretty closely with what you're looking at.

My next project is based on a news story I read over the weekend about jumpers on Tampa's Sunshine Skyway. The state is pulling funding (budget crisis) for the 24-hour watches that have saved over 90 lives in the last couple of years. The article mentioned that people have linked the place, which is one of great beauty, with the act of suicide. What draws people to a particular place to take their lives? And if a place can carry the residue of all those lost, how much build-up must there be at the crest of that great bridge?

So what do you think? Do ghosts exist? Do places retain energy? Fire away...

Writing Theory: Symbolism and Allusion

Before I get to the writing discussion, I wanted to jot a quick note about the jog I just took. It's 82 degrees outside right now in Jacksonville. The humidity is starting to creep up there, so I decided to grab a four mile jog out at the Spanish Pond before the day became too hot to finish it comfortably.

This is really a remarkable run. It begins on the boardwalk in the photo shown in the link above and winds through a bunch of mangroves. On either side of the boardwalk there's a series of cypress swamps filled with tawny, brackish water. The mangroves and cypress trees mingle with scrubby pines and grow over the top of the boardwalk to create a tunnel through the jungle.

After about a half-mile the boardwalk spills out onto a sandy trail that winds up and down some pretty steep dunes. This is where it gets dicey. At the entrance to the trail is a sign warning of venomous snakes. We have rattlers and water moccasins and cottonmouths and coral snakes. When it's 82 degrees outside, they like to scoot around out there. I swear, every dozen steps or so the bushes on either side of me rattled with activity. When I got to the top of the highest dune on the Temecuan Trail, I saw about a six foot indigo snake dart right across the path in front of me.

I'm not ashamed to say I yipped when I saw it.

After you summit that dune you run downhill for a stretch until you descend to sea level in a series of tidal marshlands. The trail is strewn with centuries of accumulated oyster shell and, before long, it terminates in a man-made birding platform. I had the platform to myself and I stopped to catch my breath.

The Round Marsh is really a sight to see. There were two fellows quietly trolling in a flats boat out in the marsh, but other than that it was just the puffy white clouds, the creaking oyster beds and the jumping fish. This is one of my favorite routes, but it's a bit different with so many critters around. I took a five miler out at UNF's nature trail yesterday and spooked a snake out there as well. That's in addition to the two gators Jeanne and I saw (one in a road-side retention pond!) over the weekend...

On to the writing discussion. Literary fiction, science fiction, horror and fantasy all lend themselves very readily toward the inclusion of symbolism and allusion. That's not to say that there's no place for them in the thriller/cozy/mystery/chick lit. genres, because there is. But the audience isn't as apt to require that second level of context that a symbolic reference creates in a thriller as they might in a fantasy novel.

There are two primary types of symbols: contextual and universal. An allusion is a direct reference to a work or character from classic literature, mythology or art.

In the longer work in progress I've been toiling at for the last year, I make heavy use of the universal symbol of wheat. The Greeks idealized wheat as a symbol of life and the whole of humanity. They worshipped a god of the harvest named Cronus. Numerous cultures depict the grim reaper as a hooded character with a scythe, used to collect the harvest of souls.

In my story, the protagonists are a pair of wheat farmers. The rising number of deaths in their isolated ranching community falls in line with the harvest they oversee on the ranch.

Water is a common universal symbol for life. A dove is a symbol for peace.

Contextual symbols glean their meaning from the text in which they appear. In Nick Hornby's fine story "Otherwise Pandemonium," the narrator foretells the end of the world by watching the content he finds on a magic VCR. The machine itself is a symbolic nod to how our technology is, ironically, undermining the progress of the global community.

An allusion is a reference to the classics. I'm reading Alan Lightman's novel Ghost right now. The book makes repeated references to Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." The story's central character, David, seems fated to walk a parallel path to that of the mariner at the center of the story: to live a form of existential repetition for the rest of his days. In effect, he's cursed to a life of mundane sameness, just like the narrator in Coleridge's poem.

As I said, not every narrative calls for the use of symbolism or allusion. But including these abstractions adds a layer of texture to the work. It also can be an economic means of communicating complicated ideas to a perceptive audience. Your work will let you know when you need to season with a symbol or spice with an allusion, but the more you handle them--the more you think in terms of comparisons in your daily observations--the better they'll come to you...