Notes From A Recently Deflowered Vagina Virgin

The cast and director of California State University, Sacramento's 2011 V-Day production of The Vagina Monologues. Top row (from left): Jaimie Davis, Sadie Jeffries, Katherine Williams, Jasmine Wyrick, Divya Goconda, Carolina Mendoza, Elizabeth Johnson, Rochelle Robinson, Charity King. Middle row (from left): Liz Rowell (director), Macellina Amonoo, Julie Tan, Natasha Tricoche, Linda Bean. Bottom row (from left): Ariana Lozano, Keyko Torres, Liz Redford, Michelle So, Meredith Carey, Megan Brubaker, Chelsea Castillo, Jamie Jackson.

Until Saturday, February 19, I was a vagina virgin. The Vagina Monologues has been around since 1996 and it has been widely performed and celebrated, but it’s taken me this long to see it. Dawn and I attended the final performance of Sacramento State’s annual V-Day production of the play. Our friend Liz Rowell has been involved in the production for the past six years, but this year – her final year – she was the director, which made our first time even more enjoyable. It was a vibrant show with a cast of talented students who dove head-first into their roles and made the popping of my Vagina cherry a memorable experience.

It was originally my intention to write a review of the production, but first, I decided to do a little research and soak up some of the play’s history. This led me to some things with which I disagreed, and that led me to forming opinions and that led to – well, my point is that this isn’t the blog I intended to write and it’s probably longer than it would have been otherwise. Just so you know.

Here’s a little history of the play for those who might still be unfamiliar with it – although that seems unlikely because it has become a feminist phenomenon. The monologues are drawn from interviews Eve Ensler first conducted with friends about relationships, sex, and violence against women. But these friends referred her to other women who had other stories to tell. In an interview on Women.com, Ensler said, “It was like this great vagina trail I was sucked into.” The initial reluctance of the interviewees soon gave way to an enthusiastic outpouring of stories and feelings, all of which went into the monologues. The play opened at HERE Arts Center in New York City on October 3, 1996, and has remained an evolving, living thing ever since.

In the Women.com interview, Ensler was asked, “Why do you think you've become so impassioned by vaginas as opposed to, say, breasts? Or giving birth? Or other women-only experiences?” She responded:

“I was drawn to vaginas because of my own personal history, because of sexuality, because women's empowerment is deeply connected to their sexuality. And, I'm obsessed with women being violated and raped, and with incest. All of these things are deeply connected to our vaginas. ... I think growing up in a violent society is a big part of it. I lived in a very brutal household, so all that deeply shaped this.”

That obsession moved Ensler and a group of other women to establish V-Day in 1998, a non-profit movement that raises money to increase awareness of and work toward stopping violence against women. Every February, colleges and communities across the country perform The Vagina Monologues to benefit the movement. Each year, V-Day spotlights a specific group of women who are being victimized by violence somewhere in the world, and a new monologue is written about that group. In 2008, the spotlight was on the women of New Orleans, in 2009 and 2010 it was on the women and girls of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and this year it was on the women of Haiti. It’s easy for those of us who live in the United States to forget the fact that in other parts of the world, violence against women is an everyday part of life – rape as warfare, female genital mutilation and the oppression of women by religion are as common in other parts of the globe as sporting events and yard sales are in America. V-Day passionately points this out. It demands that attention be paid and steps be taken to stop violence against women wherever it occurs.

Over the years, both The Vagina Monologues and V-Day have been the target of a good deal of criticism. I see that as a good sign because I’m of the opinion that if you aren’t pissing somebody off or at least being criticized, then you’re not getting anything done. Unsurprisingly, much of that criticism has come from religious conservatives, but some of it has come from other feminists, as well.

The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP) – a hell of a mouthful that I do not recommend swallowing – has urged people to protest the play because it is “a piece replete with sexual encounters, lust, graphic descriptions of masturbation and lesbian behavior.” On TFP’s website, references to the play’s title are written like this: “The V***** Monologues.”

Typically, words are censored because they are considered obscene or offensive. “Vagina” is neither. It’s the actual name of a part of the female anatomy. But the people at TFP have censored it as if it is an obscenity. Why? Well, it looks to me like they think it is an obscenity. It is this kind of thinking that makes The Vagina Monologues absolutely necessary.

The Network of Enlightened Women is a conservative organization that, judging by its title, thinks rather highly of itself. It was founded at the University of Virginia in 2004 and has leveled severe criticism at the play for being vulgar and demeaning to women. In a 2006 article titled "V is for Vulgar," organization president Meredith Ramsey writes, “First and foremost, The Vagina Monologues effectively reduces women to their vaginas.” She claims the play “is demeaning to women, degrading to men, dangerous for children and uncouth.”

While I must credit Ramsey with being enough of a fucking grownup to actually write out the full word “vagina,” I have to dismiss her criticism along with TFP’s. They reveal far more about the critics than about Ensler’s play. These are people who do not see the world as most people see it. They believe that sex is shameful, genitals are naughty, women should behave a certain way, and we simply should not talk about any of the things discussed in the play no matter how many women are being hurt because that would be ... well, uncouth. Again, it is this kind of thinking that makes The Vagina Monologues absolutely necessary.

In America these days, the words “conservative” and “christian” are virtually synonymous. American conservatives champion the rules and regulations of Christianity whether individual conservatives are religious or not. As I’ve said many times before, the Republican party is no longer a political party – it is now the political arm of the Christian religion. Prominent among conservative values is the idea that women just shouldn’t get too damned uppity. They are wives and mothers, dammit, and they need to remember that! (Sometimes, of course, they have to be reminded.) They’re supposed to stay home where they belong, be subservient to their husbands, and if they decide not to have children, well, then, they’re just not hooked up right. And if they decide not to get married, they must be lesbians, and we all know that's a sin and an abomination unto the lord – unless, of course, a man is allowed to watch and then join in when he’s ready, in which case the lord doesn’t seem to mind so much as long as everyone involved isn't so uncouth as to talk about it. Genitals are dirty things. They became dirty as soon as the first woman screwed up everything for everybody by listening to the talking snake in the magic garden, eating the forbidden fruit, and then seducing the first man – who was perfectly innocent in all of this, mind you – into doing the same thing. Before that happened, there was no naughty sex and genitals were mostly for urinating and all was right with the lord. God had told the first man and woman to “be fruitful and multiply,” so obviously, there was sex going on, but nobody called it fucking and they only did it in the missionary position, so it was okay. But then along came that talking snake and Eve wanted a snack, so everything went to hell. That’s why women bleed every month, don’tcha know. God’s punishing them for throwing a wrench into everything. And now we have to make sure that women stay in line and act as man's “help meet,” as the bible instructed. Merriam-Webster defines “help meet” as, “A woman who keeps her mouth shut, her legs open and the kitchen clean.”

Okay, okay, I admit it, that’s not how Merriam-Webster defines “help meet” – mostly because the phrase “help meet,” like the ridiculous beliefs described above, is archaic and has no place in the modern world. But organizations like TFP and the Network of Enlightened Women cling to that archaic way of thinking and apply it to everything around them – including The Vagina Monologues, which TFP can’t even write without censoring itself because this archaic way of thinking makes the vagina a bad, dirty thing that must be hidden away and never discussed.

But conservatives aren’t the only ones who criticize the play and V-Day.

Betty Dodson is a pioneer in sexual liberation. She is a sex educator, author, feminist, artist, and is a well-known champion of positive attitudes toward female sexuality and masturbation. For 25 years, she ran Bodysex groups in which women learned about and discussed their bodies and sexual pleasure and learned to reach orgasm through self stimulation. You might think that’s something that everyone naturally knows and can do, but if that were the case, people like Betty Dodson would not be necessary and we wouldn’t be living in a world filled with the shame and self-loathing that has been the generous gift of religion. I’ve always been a great admirer of Dodson’s work – I think what she does is important, even vital, in a culture that’s obsessed with and hungry for sex but ashamed and afraid of it and wildly confused about it. Dodson has been an outspoken critic of The Vagina Monologues and V-Day for what she sees as an emphasis on sexual violence rather than sexual pleasure. In an article on her website, Dodson writes about a production of the play she attended at Madison Square Garden:

“Goddess forbid people would be sent home happy with new information about women's sexual pleasure. Instead, this powerful venue, Madison Square Garden, sends us home feeling guilty about all the women in Africa, Bosnia and Afghanistan who are being raped, tortured and genitally mutilated. Many leave with the false belief that all the millions raised will actually end sexual violence against women. This becomes a bad joke when we realize that American women must continue the struggle to preserve our right to choose abortion, have easy access to birth control and sex information now that the religious right controls the White House. ...

“That's the main problem with V-Day. Women end up with a false idea that V-day will end violence against women and girls. Ending violence is a worthy cause and I'm all for it, but consistently equating sex with violence offers no real solution. V-Day promises us that awareness plus education equals prevention. I can only hope that by the time they get to the education phase, a group of orgasmic women will replace The Vagina Monologues with Clit Conversations that will teach women how to take sexual pleasure into their own hands.”

I understand the point Dodson makes, but I don’t agree with it. I’ve only seen the play once, and if I were to sit down and read it and sit through multiple performances, I might find things about it that don’t quite sit right with me. But the production I saw was exhilarating, disturbing and eye-opening, and that’s what art should do – make you feel things and think things. I admire what it does, and I think it is successful in doing it. The Vagina Monologues is not meant to send people “home happy with new information about women’s sexual pleasure.” If that’s what you want, then I strongly recommend Dodson’s work. She does that beautifully, and I think it’s a very important thing to do. Among other great things, her work points out double standards, the obstacles that stand in the way of sexual pleasure, and then sweeps them aside to embrace that pleasure. That is what Dodson does, and she does it better than anybody.

I think it’s a mistake for Dodson to expect Ensler’s play to do the same thing, because that’s simply not what it intends to do. Ensler has other things on her mind and The Vagina Monologues is about those things. The play does not focus only on women in other countries “being raped, tortured and genitally mutilated.” It includes that, yes, but it also talks about Native American women on reservations in the United States, where violence and rape occur three times more often than anywhere else in the country (something I didn't know before I saw the play). It talks about a little girl here in America who is raped and brutalized. At no point did I get the impression that the play arrogantly believes it will single-handedly end violence against women, but it seems to know that the only way it will end – if it ever does – will be through an angry refusal to remain silent while it goes on. Yes, awareness and education are extremely important, but I saw nothing in the play to suggest that they are the only solution. Without awareness and education, however, nothing will happen.

If you want to see a film that tells a dramatic, emotional story that will move you, it might not be a good idea to see a film written and directed by, say, Judd Apatow or Mel Brooks. If you do see a film written and directed by Apatow or Brooks, it’s really not fair to complain that it did not tell a dramatic, emotional, moving story because it didn’t intend to – it intended to make you laugh with jokes about farts and boobs. The problem is not the movie you saw but the fact that you saw that movie when you were in the mood to see another. If a movie by Apatow or Brooks fails to accomplish its goal of making you laugh with jokes about farts and boobs, then criticizing it for that is appropriate. But it’s unfair to criticize it for what it isn’t.

We are all shaped by our experiences and by how we process those experiences. Eve Ensler has said that “growing up in a violent society” and living “in a very brutal household” were part of what “deeply shaped” The Vagina Monologues. As a victim of brutality herself, Ensler is angered by the brutality against women that she sees around her. Her work is an expression of that anger and she has tried to channel that anger in a way that will raise awareness in others and work toward stopping the brutality. I can’t find anything to criticize in that.

Dodson refers to Ensler as “an evangelical minister” in the way Ensler focuses on the subject of violence against women. She thinks The Vagina Monologues is hateful toward men and heterosexuality and blames them both for this problem. This makes me scratch my head. Did we see the same play? I didn’t come away with that feeling at all. Dodson writes:

“It's very difficult to criticize V Day without sounding anti-woman or pro-violence. Dare we ask why so many feminists think women have cornered the market on being victimized by violence? Will we sound too insensitive in mentioning the violence caused by poverty, hunger, and wars that affect women, men and children of every gender? Are we to ignore all the wives who verbally abuse and dominate husbands? It's almost as if feminists insist on ignoring the power that many mothers wield in the home to preserve the image that all woman are helpless victims incapable of violence. ... Could we cut to the chase and say that the source of violence against women comes from the extreme fundamentalists in all the major religions including Christians, Jews, Hindus and Muslims? That all forms of authoritarianism exercised by both women and men are the source of violence along with ignorance and prejudice?”

Those are excellent points and in a sense, I agree with them. For example, I wish there were more plays (and movies and novels) that expressed anger about the violence and sexual abuse committed against young boys, because so much of the violence against women is the result of young boys being violently abused and molested and growing up to be violent abusers because that's what they know, the environment in which they developed. But while these are good points, I'm not sure they’re entirely fair. If this play were to tackle all of those things, it would no longer be The Vagina Monologues – it would be something else entirely. Again, I think it’s wrong to criticize any piece of art for what it isn’t, for what it doesn’t do. Yes, all of the things Dodson lists above are very real problems. No, violence against women is not the only problem in the world and it's certainly not the only kind of violence out there. And yes, dropping the blame on individual men is a mistake when the problem really stems from institutions that have set themselves up as unquestionable and beyond criticism – in other words, religion. That’s usually my target.

I do a lot of writing about the many ways religion has damaged – and continues to damage – our world and the ways in which it has resulted in bad government, hateful bigotry and sexism, the rejection of science and knowledge, a kind of institutionalized and dehumanizing self-loathing, both physical and psychological child abuse, wars and widespread willful ignorance. Every time I write or speak about this subject, someone – usually several someones – accuse me of being an “evangelical minister.” They claim I’m no different than Pat Robertson or the late Jerry Falwell condemning homosexuality or feminism or Harry Potter. This, of course, is mind-numbingly ridiculous because it ignores one major fact: I am not condemning homosexuality or feminism or Harry Potter. If I were, then I would be like an evangelist minister, but I’m not. Does the fact that I’m passionate about my subject mean that I’m like an “evangelical minister?” I can't understand how. Lots of people are passionate about lots of things – they are not all evangelical ministers. This is a nonsensical criticism. In fact, it’s not a criticism at all – it is a deliberate insult meant to discredit me disguised as a criticism. They also point out that religion is not the only source of bad things, that bad things come from all kinds of places. This usually makes my head explode. Does the fact that bad things come from other sources justify or absolve the evil that religion does? Of course not. But that’s what these someones are saying, whether they’re aware of it or not. When I talk about the evil that religion does, I’m talking about the evil that religion does. What these someones are saying is, “Don’t talk about that, Ray! We don’t like it! Talk about something else or shut up!” My response is, if you don’t like it, don’t listen to or read it. I’m not shutting up.

The Vagina Monologues addresses violence against women and girls. If for some reason you don’t want to hear about or be aware of violence against women, then don’t’ see The Vagina Monologues, because that’s what it’s about. Go see something else. Because Eve Ensler isn’t shutting up. And she shouldn’t.

I don’t mean to suggest that Betty Dodson is the only critic of The Vagina Monologues, or that her criticisms are unreasonable. She’s not and they’re not. I’ve spent this much time on her comments because she’s reasonable, and because I’m familiar with and admire her. There has been a good deal of criticism of the play from other feminists, as well, and while I don’t have the room to focus on all of it, two points in particular stand out because they deal with things to which I am very sensitive. They are articulated well by feminist author Wendy McElroy in a 2002 article on her website (link).

“A play that claims to unveil the truth about vaginas but, somehow, overlooks the salutary role men play in most women's sexuality has no credibility. Worse than this, The Vagina Monologues equates men with ‘the enemy’ and heterosexual love with violence.”

Once again, it’s hard for me to believe that we’re talking about the same play. I saw nothing in The Vagina Monologues that struck me that way – and I’m a man! I get prickly when I hear a woman complain that “all men” are insensitive or violent or unfaithful or ... anything. It simply isn’t true – just as it’s not true that all women are anything. Men and women have one thing in common – they’re human beings. And human beings inhabit a vast spectrum of behavior ranging from good to abhorrent. However, I never cease to be amazed by the insensitive, cruel, shocking, stupid and ugly things that many members of my sex do on a fairly regular basis, and I know there are a lot of double standards that allow men to get away with behavior for which women are vilified. It’s just that I’m sensitive about the “all men” qualification. It simply isn’t true that all men engage in these bad behaviors and I resent the accusation that they do. I didn’t see that accusation in The Vagina Monologues.

If Ensler's play truly equated men with "the enemy," then it would not include the monologue titled "Because He Liked to Look at It," about a woman who meets and becomes involved with a man who is kind and tender and loves the pussy so much that the first time they're together, he sits and stares at it and talks about it for an hour. It's a wonderful piece that does not contain an ounce of hatred for men or heterosexuality. Why doesn't McElroy mention it?

I felt the play was pointing out not so much the violence of individual men but the violence against women that is inherent in a culture and a system that is favorable toward men – because for so long it has been dominated by men – but subjugates women. Despite all of the advances we’ve made since the cultural explosion of the 1960s, that culture and system still exist.

I don’t think all violence toward women is physical. I think things are done in our society that can result in women being physically harmed, and I see those things as a kind of violence against women. There are a couple of excellent examples that occurred recently.

In January 2011, New Jersey Republican Chris Smith introduced H.R. 3 into the House, a bill that attempted to redefine “rape.” It proposed making the Hyde Amendment permanent. That’s the amendment that prohibits government-funded healthcare programs from funding abortions except in the case of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother. H.R. 3 added the word “forcible” – it proposed that abortions be funded only in the case of “forcible rape.” As far as I’m concerned, Smith’s proposal was an act of violence toward women because essentially, it’s saying, “Were you really raped? We’re not so sure. Does your definition of rape match our definition of rape? Let’s check first, because if we don’t think you were raped, you’re on your own, honey.”

Then there’s the Pence Amendment. Mike Pence, a Republican congressman who represents Indiana’s 6th district, is an evangelical Christian who, in 2007, staunchly opposed a hate crime bill because he feared it would endanger Christians who condemn homosexuality. In other words, the bill might get in the way of a Christian’s right to discriminate against, mistreat or persecute homosexuals with impunity. This year, Pence proposed an amendment that would strip Planned Parenthood of all government funding because Planned Parenthood provides abortions. The amendment passed with a vote of 240 to 185, with 11 Democrats voting for it and seven Republicans against. None of the government funding that Planned Parenthood receives goes toward abortions, but supporters of the amendment claim that the money indirectly funds abortions. Because these supporters are opposed to abortion – which, by the way, remains legal – they want to remove all of Planned Parenthood’s funding, which would bring a halt to the things it provides – like birth control, medical exams, screenings for breast and cervical cancer, family planning information and HIV testing, among other valuable, even lifesaving, services. That is violence against women. This congress has voted to throw a whole lot of women under the bus – make no mistake, women will die if Planned Parenthood disappears – because some people disapprove of a controversial but perfectly legal and, most importantly, extremely personal procedure that is received only by women.

Like I said, despite all the advances we’ve made, we still live in a culture that is systematically biased against women – mostly because of Christians who want to legislate their personal religious beliefs for everyone so that everyone must live by them.

I give these two examples to illustrate the fact that violence against women is not just some guy beating the crap out of his wife or girlfriend. It doesn’t take place only in foreign lands. It’s part of the fabric of life in America. It’s an attitude as well as a physical act. Pointing that out, trying to raise awareness of it and get people to feel something about it does not “equate men with ‘the enemy’ and heterosexual love with violence.”

This is not like a typical play that is imagined from beginning to end by the author, populated by fictional characters who do things that didn’t really happen. This is made up of the personal experiences of individual women. When one of the women says of her first sexual experience with a woman, “I’ll never need to rely on a man,” neither her words nor her sexuality are meant to apply to all women. This is her experience and it is included with the stories of other women who shared their experiences. If you take this to mean that all women should have the same experiences or feel and think the same things, then you are missing the point of the play. (Also, you're just a little bit odd, if I may say so.) Nothing about the play suggests that all men are violent rapists or that heterosexual love is a bad thing. Some of the stories involve violent men who rape and homosexual relationships, yes, that’s true. But to say that it’s making a general statement about these things that applies to everyone is like saying the story of Helen Keller is an insult to all blind and deaf mutes who do not accomplish precisely all of the things Keller accomplished in her lifetime.

By far, the most criticized part of the play is a monologue titled “The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could.” A grown woman tells of the abuses she suffered early in life, and then recounts her first sexual experience at the age of 16 with a 24-year-old woman who gives her alcohol and gets her into bed. Originally, the woman’s age was 13 at the time of the sexual encounter. This has upset a lot of people. Wendy McElroy writes:

“Both by statute and by feminist definition, the ‘seduction’ scene is rape. Nevertheless, the Coochi Snorcher declares, ‘ ... if it was rape, it was a good rape.’

“Such idealization of child molestation would have created a firestorm of outrage if the offending character had been male. But the molester was female, so The Vagina Monologues won an OBIE Award on Broadway and noted actresses clamored to be included in the cast. When the New York Times reported the buzz about Ensler, it called her ‘the messiah heralding the second wave of feminism.'

“However, audiences probably won't hear the Coochi Snorcher speaking of ‘good rape’ in the 2002 performances. In past years, some sections of The Vagina Monologues have caused embarrassment to the organizers and university officials who have backed V-Day performances. The script has been changed.”

McElroy is right – if the 24-year-old woman had been a man, there would have been a lot of outrage. That’s a prevalent double standard in our society that usually sends me into a rant – and it’s a double standard that favors women. If The Vagina Monologues were a straight play that told a fictional story that put a positive spin on the statutory rape of a 13- or 16-year-old girl, this probably would be a very different blog. I qualify that with “probably” because, to be honest, it would depend on the tone of the play. I don’t like making hypothetical generalizations, especially when it comes to plays or movies or novels, because fiction can depict all kinds of acts and behaviors that, in reality, are wrong but do it in a way that does not condone those acts or behaviors. But this isn’t that kind of play.

Ensler took these monologues from real people who were sharing their own personal experiences. The Coochie Snorcher herself saw this as a positive experience. Yes, it was statutory rape, and yes, the 24-year-old woman was wrong. Got that? I’m saying she was wrong. But compared to the abuses suffered by the Coochie Snorcher previous to this experience, she saw it as her “salvation,” as she put it. It was her experience, and that was how she processed it. If she saw it as a good experience, if she claims it opened her eyes to positive things and changed her life in a good way, no one is in any position to tell her she’s wrong. We don’t have to approve of what that woman did and there’s nothing wrong with expressing our disapproval. But to condemn the entire play because of one woman’s interpretation of something that happened to her is a big reach.

In a 2000 article about V-Day, McElroy refers to The Vagina Monologues as “pro-rape.” Wow. That’s pretty mind-blowing. I admit, I learned all of this only while researching this article. I don’t know who’s who in feminism and which factions are clashing with which other factions over what, but like any movement, I know there are differing opinions involved and some of the disagreements can get ... well, heated. This sure looks to me like there’s more going on here than just an opinion of a play – know what I mean? Calling The Vagina Monologues “pro-rape” is like calling E.T. anti-extraterrestrial. And it makes it a little difficult to take McElroy seriously.

Here’s what I think of The Vagina Monologues. It addresses a problem that needs to be addressed and does it in a way that is entertaining and moving. It encourages women to value and nurture their sexuality rather than be ashamed of it. It embraces women and denounces sexism, violence and oppression. And it raises money for a worthy cause. I can’t see any negatives in that.

The production I saw at California State University, Sacramento, featured a rainbow of enthusiastic and talented women who were passionate about what they were doing and wholeheartedly believed in it. And it was brilliantly directed by my friend Liz Rowell.

If The Vagina Monologues comes to a college or community near you next February, go see it. If you’ve never seen it before, I think you will find it a wonderful experience. If you’ve seen it before and found in it the same value I found, see it again to support the cause.

TRAILER PARK NOIR: The Story Behind the Book

Although I’m known mostly for my horror fiction, my latest novel, Trailer Park Noir is not a horror novel. It’s a dark tale about the residents of Riverside Mobile Home Park, a small trailer park in the northern California town of Anderson.

I grew up in Anderson. In fact, I grew up next door to the trailer park that’s described in this novel. For the book, I moved the park to another part of town so it could be on the shore of the Sacramento River, but it’s the same one I lived next to as a boy. The real one was called Shady Hill Trailer Park. It had no pretensions – it was not a “mobile home park,” it was a trailer park, dammit!

I lived in a tiny little house on what was then called Old Churn Creek Road. It was a somewhat rural area with the houses pretty spread out. On the western side of our house was another house where my uncle and aunt and cousins lived. On the other side of their house was a creek and a hill beyond which were a few mores houses on roomy plots of land. On the eastern side, in our yard, my paternal grandmother lived in a little trailer (I’ve written about Grandma Berens in this blog before). Across the narrow street from our house was a patch of dense woods.

Behind Grandma’s trailer was a fence, and on the other side of that fence was Shady Hill Trailer Park. Directly on the other side of that fence was Sally’s trailer. Sally was, at that time, the oldest and most wrinkled human being I had ever seen in my life. Granted, my life had not been going on for very long. I must have been around five years old or so; I had not started school yet. I don’t remember exactly how I met Sally. I suspect wet met at the fence between Grandma’s trailer and hers. I don’t remember Grandma Berens ever meeting Sally, though I’m sure that, at some point, she did. Sally was cheerful and happy and liked everyone and Grandma Berens was a miserable, hateful old bitch. I don’t imagine Grandma would have liked her one bit. Sally ended up inviting me over to her trailer for some treat – cookies, or something, I don’t remember. What I do remember is Sally.

She was a heavy smoker and probably looked older than she was. Her skin was etched with countless wrinkles, some deeper than others, which formed a chaotic map of wear and tear on her face. She had no teeth. Her voice was hoarse and her laugh – she laughed a lot – was rattly and wheezy. I remember her hands being as wrinkled as her face and quite big, although I probably got the impression of size from her large knuckles, which were knobby with arthritis. Thin as a rail, her upper back had a slight hunch to it. She was quite spry and active, seemed to be smiling all the time, and she loved children. It was common to see children visiting her trailer and I got to know a couple of them. My mother met Sally and liked her, so she allowed me to walk around the fence behind Grandma’s trailer and visit Sally whenever I wanted. Sally was always happy to see me and I remember enjoying my visits with her. Looking back on it, I have no sense of how long I knew her, but it couldn’t have been long. One day, I went to her trailer and knocked. Her front door was open, the screen door was closed and her television was playing inside. But she didn’t come to the door. That wasn’t unusual for Sally because she often wandered around the trailer park and visited other residents. I walked out to the paved road that cut through the small trailer park and looked around for Sally. That was the first time I got a good look at Shady Hill Trailer Park from the inside.

It was like a neighborhood within a neighborhood, another world that existed right next door. There were a lot of trees and most of them were silk trees, all bright with pink blossoms that danced in the warm breeze. There was a row of trailers on each side of the paved road that ran down the center of the park and then looped around a barn-red, partly ivy-covered house at the other end. It was the home of the park’s managers. Each trailer had a little patch of grass and many had been decorated with pinwheels and colorful plaster gnomes. I’d passed by the park’s entrance many times in my parents’ car, but I’d never been inside. It looked like a charming little village hidden away from the world.

I saw no sign of Sally. I decided to try again later and went home. Later that day, Mom learned that Sally had died in her trailer. Other than seeing people die on TV in series and movies, this was my first experience with the reality of death. A couple of days later, Mom dressed me up in my church clothes and took me to Sally’s funeral. It was held in the tiny chapel of the funeral home in Anderson and there were only a few people there. The atmosphere in that claustrophobic chapel was smothering. It was all unfamiliar to me and I was extremely uncomfortable. Then I saw Sally. She was lying in a large box at the front of the chapel.

“Come see Sally one last time,” Mom said, walking me to the big box.

I had been led to believe that Sally was gone, and to me, "gone" meant that she was no more, that she had ceased to exist. But there she was, lying in that box. She looked different, though – almost like a department store mannequin. She didn't look real. Drawing from the Seventh-day Adventist teaching about death, Mom explained that it was only Sally’s body, that Sally herself was gone. She was sleeping, unconscious, waiting for Judgment Day when Jesus would return in the clouds and all the dead people would be resurrected for that great cosmic game show, Let’s Make An Eternal Deal! Then it would be decided if Sally and all the other resurrected folks would go to heaven and be with Jesus for all eternity or be thrown into the Lake of Fire to burn and suffer for a period of time appropriate to their sins. And then they simply would cease to exist. Of course, Sally’s chances weren’t too good. She might have been a nice, happy lady who laughed a lot and was kind to children, but she smoked and she didn’t observe the Sabbath because she wasn’t a Seventh-day Adventist. So Sally’s ass was probably going to fry. But at least I’d had the opportunity to know her for a little while.

I’m not sure what horrified me more – the idea that Jesus would throw Sally into the Lake of Fire or the fact that her dead body was lying out in the open for people to look at before she was buried. I kept thinking somebody should close the box and give Sally some privacy. To this day, I think open casket funerals are barbaric and I refuse to participate in them. When I die, I’m going to be cremated immediately and kept in my Batman cookie jar on top of the television.

During my visits to Sally’s trailer, I met a couple of the kids from the trailer park. One was Marcy, the granddaughter of the park’s managers. She didn’t live there but visited often. She had blond hair and wore glasses with black oval frames. One day at Sally’s, Marcy talked about the fairies who lived in front of her grandparents’ house. That got my attention. I asked her to show them to me. She took me up the road to the barn-red house with all the ivy growing on it and showed me a little fountain that stood amid some of that ivy in front of the house. It was pink and blue, although the colors were very faded; it hadn’t been used in a long time and was dried up and dirty. Marcy pointed to the holes where the water used to come out and said, “They live in there.” I said I wanted to see them and asked when they came out. “You can’t see them,” she said. “They’re invisible.” I guess I was a skeptic even at that tender age because I wasn’t buying it. Invisible fairies? I knew for a fact that fairies weren’t invisible! I never missed an episode of The Wonderful World of Disney, and every Sunday night, the show opened with Tinkerbell getting right in my face and waving her wand around – and I could see her very clearly! Obviously, Marcy had been misled. I tried to explain the facts to her, but she wasn’t interested. “My fairies are invisible,” she said. “Your fairies can be whatever you want them to be!” Marcy and I spent time together whenever she visited her grandparents. She taught me how to play “doctor.” It was her idea and she laid out all the rules. That might be why I’ve always had a great appreciation for women who know what they want and aren’t afraid to say so.

I also met Buddy during one of my visits to Sally’s trailer. Buddy had blond hair, too, and I remember him frowning a lot. He spoke loudly and had a lot of mood swings. One minute, he was my best friend; the next, he was angry and acting like he hated me. In other words, playing with Buddy was a lot like living with my family. One day, he got very angry for no reason I could understand – which, given my experience with my father, seemed perfectly normal to me – and chased me out of the trailer park. He threw rocks at me and called me all kinds of unpleasant names. One of those names was new to me – I’d never heard it before. Obviously, playtime with Buddy was over, so I went home. Mom was in the kitchen sitting at the table with three women she knew from church. When I came in, they were laughing and talking about whatever it was church ladies talked about in the late 1960s and there were a couple of open bibles on the table. Curious about that unfamiliar name Buddy had called me, I stepped up to the table and said, “Mom, what’s a ‘fucker?’”

There was an abrupt silence as they froze while staring at me, followed by the sound of four church-lady chins hitting the surface of our kitchen table. One of the ladies burst into tears, buried her face in her hands and sobbed. Mom shot out of her chair and hurried me out of the kitchen, leaning forward to whisper in my ear, “Don’t you say things like that, that’s an awful word, don’t you ever say that again, do you hear me?” It was a long time before I said that word out loud again, and even then it was quietly and only in the presence of very close friends I could trust. I didn’t want to trigger anymore nervous breakdowns in anyone. By the time I was 20, I’d stopped caring. Now I tend to use that word as punctuation.

I have no idea whatever became of Marcy or Buddy. Back then, the residents of Shady Hill Trailer Park were mostly senior citizens. As the years passed, that changed. Now it’s run down, filthy, and is frequently visited by officers of the law. The residents are younger and much tweakier, if you know what I mean. It’s not a very safe place. Mom still lives in the same tiny house next to the trailer park and prefers that the residents stay on their side of the fence. Not long ago, I drove by the entrance of the park and saw three young women standing beside the road. They weren’t doing anything – just standing there. They appeared less than hygienic and their clothes were ... well, they were dressed like ... look, there’s no delicate way to put this, okay? They looked like hookers. When I got a better look at them, I realized they couldn’t be any older than 13. It’s that kind of place now. When I wrote Trailer Park Noir, I wanted to capture the feeling of Shady Hill Trailer Park that I experienced as a little boy and then reveal the dark underside. But somehow, that eluded me. It was overshadowed by what the park had become.

Trailer Park Noir is about some of the residents of Riverside Mobile Home Park. Anna Dunfy is a single mother trying to make ends meet by doing temp jobs – when she can get them – and stripping at night to support her mentally handicapped daughter Kendra, an astonishingly beautiful girl with a woman’s body, the mind of a child and a dangerous urge to do something naughty. Unfortunately, there are plenty of men willing to help Kendra out with that urge. Marcus Reznick is a recovering alcoholic who’s also trying to recover from witnessing the horrible death of the love of his life. Now he’s starting his life over, and he’s starting it at the bottom -- at Riverside Mobile Home Park, where he encounters a powerful temptation. Steve Regent is an internet pornographer who has moved to Riverside to work on his new website – TrailerParkGirls.com. He’s looking for beautiful women, and he finds them. But something very ugly finds him, too. Sherry Manning is a drug addict who lives at Riverside with her drug-dealer boyfriend, Andy Winchell. When a friend of a friend ODs in their trailer, his identity and powerful connections make Sherry fear for her life and the lives of her friends. It’s a run-down little trailer park in northern California, but it could be anywhere in the United States. It is unassuming, unremarkable and looks like a million other trailer parks. But don’t let the sleepy appearance fool you – it’s a nest of dark secrets, boiling lusts and murder waiting to happen. Trailer Park Noir is available for Kindle from Amazon, Nook from Barnes and Noble, and as an audiobook.

If you'd like to learn more about my work and keep up with new releases, please visit my website at RayGartonOnline.  I hope you’ll pay a visit to Riverside Mobile Home Park, where there’s plenty of shade ... but no escape from the heat.

Just in Time for Christmas (Barely)!

My new publisher E-Reads is in the process of releasing most of my back list. They have just published two of my books that, until now, have been available only as expensive limited editions.

Murder Was My Alibi is a noirish crime novel about private investigator Myron Foote and what happens when he takes on a job for a gorgeous redhead named Cynthia Thacketer, who wants him to pose as her uncle Percy. It sounds simple, but it’s not, of course – nothing is simple when it involves more than a hundred thousand dollars, which soon turns into more than a million dollars. The book includes a cast of characters ranging from shady to quirky, some of whom pose big problems for Foote.

I set this book in the northern California town of Redding, where I was born and raised. I’ve fictionalized a bit, though. There is no “red light district” in Redding, so I had to invent one. But for the most part, the depiction is accurate.

Murder Was My Alibi was originally published in what has come to be known as “the Darknell Double.” That book also included the novel Loveless (coming soon from E-Reads), and both were written under the name Arthur Darknell, a pseudonym under which I’d planned to write crime fiction. I have since abandoned that idea and am releasing the books under my name.

The Girl in the Basement is the story of 15-year-old Ryan Ketterling, a boy who has been bounced from one foster home to the next and endured a great deal of abuse in the process. Now in the home of the Preston family, he meets and falls for fellow foster child Lyssa and thinks perhaps his luck has changed. But something strange is going on in the Preston house. Maddy is a slow girl who is kept in the basement who sometimes speaks in a gravelly, adult voice. Sometimes she knows things about other people she could not possibly know and makes predictions that come true. And there are mysterious people from the government who come to visit Maddy down in the basement. As Ryan delves deeper into the mystery, he begins to see that his luck has not changed after all.

While they are not as common as vampires, werewolves, and other horror themes, the story of possession is a tradition in the genre and has been covered pretty well. But this one doesn't include the usual elements -- Catholic priests, exorcism rituals, that sort of thing. Here's an excerpt from a review by award-winning writer Gary A. Braunbeck:

“(The Girl in the Basement) is definitely not the story you are expecting. ...Think you know what's going to happen and how it's going to happen? Forget it. ...What makes this ... one of the most accomplished pieces of Garton's career is not just the remarkable restraint he exercises when dealing with the more overtly horrific elements ...but the depth of emotional realism he displays when dealing with the characters. ... This is hands-down the single most compassionate piece he's ever written; every character is fully fleshed out, both their strengths and weaknesses, their pettiness and kindness, their courage and cowardice, are on display here, and as horrific as this 'possession' of the little girl is, it pales in comparison to the portraits Garton paints of how this horror affects the characters. There is a scene near the end of the story where Ryan has a meal of cookies and juice with his drug-addict mother that is one of the most heartbreaking things you're likely to read this year, simmering as it is with a palpable sense of desperation, loneliness, terror, and tragic inevitability. ... (T)hose readers like myself who look to Garton to always challenge himself as a storyteller and us as readers are going to come away feeling like we've just left a feast."

Originally published in 2004 by Subterranean Press, this is the first time The Girl in the Basement has been available in a mass market edition. Like Murder Was My Alibi, it is available as a paperback and an ebook.

To read an excerpt from Murder Was My Alibi or The Girl in the Basement, please follow the links.

You can order Murder Was My Alibi and The Girl in the Basement at these links. E-Reads also has several other titles of mine available to order as paperbacks and ebooks. To find out more, go to my E-Reads page.

E-Reads will be releasing more of my books in the coming months, including The New Neighbor, Biofire, 'Nids, Crawlers, Ravenous, Bestial, Shackled, Dark Channel and two brand new never-before-published suspense novels, Meds and Trailer Park Noir, among others.

Remember ... every time you give the gift of a book, an angel gets its library card. Merry Christmas and have a wonderful 2011!

LOT LIZARDS: The Story Behind the Book

After Live Girls was released, a lot of readers urged me to write a sequel. Back then, I vowed I would never write sequels. I have since learned never to say never. Nearly 20 years after Live Girls, I wrote a sequel called Night Life. I’ve written other sequels as well (Bestial, the sequel to Ravenous, and The Folks 2). But that’s a topic for another blog. Rather than write a direct sequel to Live Girls, I ended up writing a kind of vampire follow-up.

I spent a lot of time writing at the coffee counter of the restaurant at the 76 Truck Stop in Redding, California, back in the 1980s. That's where I met my wife, in fact. She was the night manager of the gift shop, and once I discovered her, I found myself spending a lot of time in that coffee shop trying to come up with reasons to talk to her. When I wasn't there, though, I was seated at the counter in the coffee shop. I sat there during the wee hours writing in my notebook, drinking coffee, eavesdropping on conversations. I listened as waitresses complained to each other about their husbands and boyfriends (some had both); as locals complained about how the liberals and Mexicans and homos were destroying the country; as cops flirted with and shamelessly groped waitresses (membership has its privileges); and as truckers chatted with each other about anything and everything under the sun.

Truckers talked about where they were headed, where they’d been, politics, music, women and the romance audiobooks they’d read — they were all addicted to romance audiobooks, with Nora Roberts being the most popular author among them. One night, I overheard two truckers talking and I perked up when I heard the phrase “lot lizard.” What on earth could a lot lizard be?

“Uglier’n a jar a warts,” one trucker said to the other. “And she was wasted. Just lookin’ for money to buy more drugs, like most of ‘em.”

As I listened closely to their conversation, I began to figure out that a lot lizard was a prostitute who worked the parking lot at truck stops, offering sexual favors to lonely truckers tired after a long stretch on the road listening to Nora Roberts novels. The definition of a lot lizard is a lot more mundane than the name itself. Those two words seized my imagination and sent it spinning. Whatever it was I’d been working on that night was forgotten.

I used the Redding 76 Truck Stop as my location in the novel, but I moved it farther north into the mountains where it was likely to be socked in by snow now and then during the winter months. I don’t outline. It just doesn’t work for me. I might make a few notes, some brief character sketches, but nothing too organized. I prefer to discover a story while I’m writing it. As I had done with Live Girls, I started writing as soon as the idea hit me. Actually, it wasn’t so much an idea as the ingredients for an idea. I had a snowed-in truck stop with truckers, truck stop waitresses and other employees ... and traveling truck stop vampire hookers. Add sex, violence and stir well.

Lot Lizards was published by Mark V. Ziesing in 1991. It was a beautiful hardcover edition, but although it was well received, it had a limited print run and its steep cover price only got steeper as the years passed and it became more collectible. For a long time, the novel was only available in that edition, so its readership has been limited.

Now Lot Lizards is finally available in an affordable mass market edition. It's available for Kindle from Amazon and for Nook from Barnes and Noble. It's also available as an audiobook, read by Ray Sizemore — which makes a perfect gift for any truckers you might know!
 
If you enjoyed Live Girls but haven’t read Lot Lizards, now is your chance to give the book a read. If you enjoy novels about vampires who are bloodthirsty and predatory — as opposed to sensitive and angst-ridden and prone to sparkling in the sunlight — you might enjoy this book. If you do, I hope you'll write a review on the Amazon or Barnes and Noble website or on your blog or website. To keep up on news and new releases, visit my website, RayGartonOnline.

Vicious Circle: A Rant

I was watching The Big Bang Theory last night – which, by the way, is one of the funniest shows on television and if you haven’t seen it, you should remedy that posthaste – and a young woman appeared who looked familiar. I frowned, wondering where I’d seen her before. For about five minutes, it drove me crazy because I just couldn’t figure out who she was. Suddenly, it hit me. That’s Eliza Dushku! I thought. Then I thought, Oh my god, she’s dying of cancer.

I remember Eliza being a little more plump, curvier, more voluptuous. Dawn said I was mistaken, but I wasn’t. I quickly Googled her and found pictures of a much softer Eliza. But the Eliza on The Big Bang Theory was not soft. She was ... well ... rather unsettling. “You’re just remembering her babyfat,” Dawn said. No, I’m sorry, that’s not true. I’m remembering a healthier looking Eliza, that’s what I’m remembering. I’m remembering an Eliza whose bones were not vividly apparent. The Eliza I saw last night had a jaw that could cut glass. I could play pool with one of her legs. And win.

If your jaw can cut glass? I’m sorry, but you’re not hot. If I can play pool with one of your legs? You’re a woman in crisis and you need to eat some goddamned sandwiches.

What in the hell has happened to us? I’m going to be 48 soon, and in my lifetime, I have watched as the popular image of the female form has gone from one of voluptuous curves to ... well, to Keira Knightley. I was channel surfing not long ago and I came across a movie in which a scary skeleton was flailing about. For a moment, I thought it was the Nicolas Cage movie Ghost Rider. But no. It was a Keira Knightley movie. I’m not even sure which one. All I know is that as soon as I realized what I was watching, I wanted to make that poor girl a plate of spaghetti. Don’t get me wrong – Keira Knightley is a beautiful young woman. It’s just that she’s not a whole beautiful young woman. She looks like she’s been animated by Ray Harryhausen and should be crossing swords with Jason and the Argonauts.

Back in the 1980s, a handful of Alfred Hitchock movies that had been out of circulation for decades were finally rereleased to theaters. One of them was Vertigo starring Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak. I saw it in the Liberty Theater in St. Helena, California. Back then, the Liberty was an art house that showed foreign films and old black-and-white movies that featured genuine movie stars from another time. It had a snack bar that offered bagels and unusual coffees with the usual theater snacks. I had never seen Vertigo – or Rear Window or The Man Who Knew Too Much or Rope or The Trouble with Harry, which were also rereleased around that time – and I was giddy with excitement. Kim Novak was a jaw-slackening, eye-popping goddess with an hourglass figure, an image of soft, strokable femininity. There were no rigid tendons in her neck, no angular bones poking out, none of the things that had become the norm by the mid-‘80s. This was 1958, just a few years before I was born, a different world, when women in movies had curvy, definable shapes. I remember thinking as I sat in the theater, She probably would be considered overweight today. Sure enough, a few minutes later, someone a couple of rows behind me said, “My god, she’s such a cow.” I nearly tossed my popcorn.

Kim Novak? A cow? What the fuck?

It’s happened to so many women in movies and television – gorgeous, voluptuous women who apparently begin listening to all the wrong people and suddenly show up looking like they should have little numbers tattooed on their forearms. Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Connely, Minnie Driver, Christina Ricci – the list is too long.

What is the purpose of this unrealistic, unhealthy female image that the media has been bludgeoning us with for so long? All you have to do is look around to see that most women simply do not look like that – which is fortunate for all of us. What’s unfortunate is that so many women have been made to feel that they should look like that. Why? Who benefits? Doctors? Eating disorder clinics? Jenny Craig? Morticians?

I’ve known so many women throughout my life who are beautiful, desirable, but who are ashamed of their bodies because they’ve been made to feel that their asses are too big or their thighs are too thick or their belly isn’t flat enough or their breasts aren’t big enough. At the same time, most of the men I’ve known have been put off by the media’s malnourished, skeletal female ideal. Bones are not sexy. Women who look like they puke on a regular basis are not a turn on.

It seems to be changing a little here and there, but not without resistance. In April of 2010, ABC and Fox balked at airing a commercial for Lane Bryant lingerie. The commercial featured a drop-dead gorgeous full-figured model in lingerie. ABC and Fox said it was just too hot for primetime. Fox refused to show it during American Idol and ABC wouldn’t show it during Dancing with the Stars until the very end. There was too much skin in this ad, too much cleavage, they claimed. As we all know, American television networks do all they can to avoid showing things like bare skin or cleavage during the primetime hours. No one ever wears anything revealing on American Idol. You never, ever see any exposed skin on Dancing with the Stars, where all the dancers are always completely covered from head to toe. Right? So that must be the reason Fox demanded some serious editing on this commercial and ABC refused to show it during one of its most popular shows. Right? It probably had nothing to do with the model’s size, which didn’t exactly fall within network television’s norm. Or maybe the networks thought they were doing their viewers a service. I can imagine some network suit saying, “Nobody wants to see that!” Or, “We certainly don’t want to give women the impression that it’s okay to look like that!”

It seems a big part of the media’s job is to make us unhappy with our lot. We need this car, that gadget, this TV, that video game system, and if we don’t get them, we are somehow failures as human beings. It’s one thing to do that with material goods. But it’s quite another to set an unrealistic standard for the human body and hold it up as the ideal so that those who do not meet that standard are made to feel inadequate.

According to the website of the South Carolina Department of Mental Health, about eight million Americans suffer from eating disorders. That in itself is alarming, but what’s more alarming is the breakdown – one million men ... and seven million women. Alarming, yes, but not too surprising, if you ask me. One in 200 American women are anorexic. Two to three in every 100 American women suffer from bulimia. Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. According to research by the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, 5% to 10% of anorexics die within 10 years of the onset of the disease and 18% to 20% of anorexics will die after 20 years. Only 30% to 40% ever recover fully from these diseases.

Businessweek.com reports that Americans spend $40 billion a year on weight loss programs and products. Of course, obesity is a growing problem in America and I’m not trying to suggest that being fat is a healthy lifestyle choice. It’s not. Take a trip to Walmart on any given day and you’ll see an abundance of people who are not only morbidly obese but who, judging by their wardrobe choices, seem to be unaware of this fact. Yes, that’s a problem, too. But how much of that yearly $40 billion is being spent by people -- let's face it, by women -- who really don’t need those programs or products but spend the money on them out of a desire to meet that unrealistic standard?

Of all the women I’ve known throughout my life, not one – not a single one, not ever – has said, “I’m too skinny.” And there have been some who were too skinny. Instead, they talk about the parts of their bodies that are too big, too flabby, too round. These are not fat women I’m talking about. These are perfectly lovely women who feel inadequate because they are the targets of cultural demands that are not only unrealistic but are unhealthy and even dangerous.

I was saddened to see what Eliza Dushku has done to herself. I used to think Angelina Jolie was the most beautiful actress to come along in years until she wasted away to a pale, hollow-eyed stick figure. It’s said that the camera puts ten pounds on the human body. If that’s the case, holy crap, what do these women look like in person? These are gorgeous women who are damaging themselves because they think they’re ... what? Too fat? Seriously? And the skinnier they get, the more pressure they put on the millions of women who watch them, who see them as some kind of ideal – an ideal they will never attain. This is a vicious circle of emotional and physical damage that we seem to be aware of but, for some reason, cannot step out of, even though we all know we should.

Halloween Ramblings: It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year!

When I was a kid, Halloween was the only time of the year when I felt normal. The rest of the year, I was that weird boy who liked horror movies and monster magazines, the guy my Seventh-day Adventist friends liked but still viewed askance ... as if I might, at any moment, reveal fangs and hiss at them. But when Halloween rolled around each fall, everyone became as weird as I, and for one night, I blended in.

Whenever someone knocked at our front door, my mother would immediately run – not walk, but run – to my bedroom and pull the door closed. Sometimes, she wouldn’t wait for a knock at the door. If a car slowed to a stop in front of our house, off she would go to shut that door. Even if it wasn’t someone stopping to see us – maybe they were lost, or stopped to light a cigarette, or something, I don’t know – and drove away a moment later, by then my bedroom was closed and Mom wore an expression of relief. She closed the door so no one could see the posters on my wall, or the issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland lying on my bed, or the Aurora model kits of Frankenstein’s Monster or the Wolf Man that stood on my shelves. There was always the chance that it might be someone from the church dropping in to see if they could catch us sinning. If they were to see the horrors in my bedroom, word would get out, and everyone at church would know what an abysmal failure my mother was as a Seventh-day Adventist parent.

Even more frightening for my mother was a knock at the door while I was watching or Dark ShadowsThe Twilight Zone or Outer Limits or Batman (my grandpa feared that Adam West’s betighted cavorting would turn me into a Satan-worshiping homosexual). Somehow, the idea of someone from church seeing me in the act of watching one of my favorite shows on TV terrified her more than the possibility of someone getting a glimpse of the Dracula poster in my room. Sometimes while I was watching one of those shows – or, even better, a horror movie double feature on Creature Features, which I never missed on Saturday nights – she would ask, “What would you do if Jesus walked in here right now and saw you watching that?” I quickly learned that smartass responses like, “Make him some popcorn,” or, “Catch him up on the plot,” did not elicit positive responses. That’s when my dad – who usually didn’t bother much about what I watched because he was usually angry and brooding about something – would get involved and ask me, “You gettin’ funny? Huh? You want me to get the belt?” He would always start to unbuckle his belt when he asked that second question. So I learned not to respond at all and told myself Mom was simply being rhetorical (although to this day, she has no idea what “rhetorical” means).

Today, my life is much, much different. I was fortunate enough to fall in love with a woman who shares my taste for the macabre. The first thing you see when you walk through our front door is a faceless Grim Reaper oozing ghost-like out of the wall and reaching out to you with both hands. On the wall beside the door are two bony hands; Dawn hangs her purse from one and the other holds keys. There’s a mummy on our living room wall. Also hanging in the living room are two holographic portraits of Dawn and me; as you walk by them, we change from our normal smiling selves into monsters – I into a werewolf and Dawn into a vampire, both with blood dribbling down our chins.

The house is filled with bats and gargoyles. In the front bathroom, a winged Nosferatu hangs upside down on the wall holding a black candle, and small skeletal hands are attached to the four corners of the mirror on the medicine cabinet. The white shower curtain is smeared with blood, some of it in the shape of hand prints. The back bathroom has two framed posters on the wall – The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Lair of the White Worm. My office is ... well, it’s what my bedroom would have looked like when I was a boy if I’d had the money to buy what I wanted and had my parents not been in the thrall of a deranged religious cult. There are movie posters on the walls – Magic, Return of the Living Dead, The Blob (the 1958 original), Curse of the Demon, Mars Attacks, and an autographed photo of the man who helped keep me sane when I was growing up, the late Bob Wilkins, host of Creature Features. On the wall behind me, the large head of a tyrannosaurus rex hangs on the wall. Also behind me, the shelf above my U-shaped desk holds a host of monsters, including a replica of the Zuni fetish doll from Trilogy of Terror and an alien from Independence Day. There are so many books in here, it looks like the room collided with a library. Monsters and dinosaurs are everywhere, as well as action figures from Star Wars, Star Trek, Lost in Space, and Batman, an alien skull beside the TV, a King Kong lunchbox on a book shelf. The walk-in closet holds three large bookshelves that are overloaded with books, top to bottom, as well as more action figures, a large tarantula, and a “Bumble” doll – the abominable snow monster from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The room next to my office is filled with movies – we call it the movie room – about a third of which are horror and science fiction films, as well as more horror and science fiction memorabilia. In the bedroom, Christopher Lee looms above our bed in a framed poster from Horror of Dracula, and a giant spiderweb made of yarn stretches out in front of the round mirror of Dawn’s vanity. There are a couple of other posters – Lee again, dining on a beautiful, bloody throat in Taste the Blood of Dracula, and House of Dark Shadows.

When people visit, they come inside, look around and inevitably say, “I see you haven’t taken down your Halloween decorations.” One of us always replies, “Yes, we have. It always looks like this.” Guests reveal a lot the moment they come into the house because they do one of two things. Either their eyes widen and a big grin slowly spreads over their faces, or their eyes narrow and they pull in their chins as they look around with frowning disapproval. Both reactions occur in varying degrees. Some people try to hide their disapproval. But they can’t. Two different people have actually screamed when they noticed our faces change in the portraits. Not unlike the Spanish Inquisition, nobody ever expects it. That always makes me happy.

Mom almost never comes over. If she does, she seldom comes inside. And if she comes inside, she doesn’t stay very long.

When I was a boy, I was taught to be ashamed of myself because of the things I enjoyed. I was taught that so well that it took decades to get over it. I’m over it.

Given the house we live in, it probably comes as no surprise that Dawn and I love the month of October. We don’t wait for Halloween – we celebrate all month long. In October, we take the horror movies off the shelf and start watching them. To be honest, we have so many that sometimes we start late in September, and even then, we don’t get through all of them by Halloween. As I write this, I’m watching Dr. Phibes Rises Again, and last night I watched The Abominable Dr. Phibes. Earlier this month, I made my way through the old series of Universal Frankenstein movies and watched a few other Universal classics like Werewolf of London and The Wolfman and The Black Cat and The Raven. It’s a month of Poe movies, like The Pit and the Pendulum and Masque of the Red Death; Lovecraft movies, like Re-Animator and From Beyond; Stoker movies, like the many versions of Dracula and Ken Russell’s insanely funny Lair of the White Worm; Stephen King movies like Carrie and The Dead Zone and The Night Flier; Val Lewton movies like Cat People and I Walked with A Zombie. The vampires in The Hunger and Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat; the werewolves in The Howling and Wolf and An American Werewolf in London; the ghosts in Poltergeist and The Legend of Hell House and The Haunting; the mad killers in Halloween and Psycho and Chamber of Horrors; the creepy aliens in Alien and It Came From Outer Space and the first two versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (sorry, not a fan of the two that followed); the terrified kids in Monster Squad and Invaders from Mars and Parents; the puppets in The Mad Monster Party and The Corpse Bride and The Nightmare Before Christmas (which also works as a Christmas movie); and the freaks in Freaks and the thing in The Thing! Don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas – but when it comes to variety, Christmas has got =nothing on Halloween!

The older I get, the more I feel a sense of sadness when I watch the old horror movies I loved so dearly as a boy. Back then, they scared me. I mean, they really scared me. I watched lengthy segments of them with my hands over my eyes, peeking between my fingers, and sometimes I had to cover my eyes completely. They made me afraid of the dark and often gave me nightmares. As a child, vampires and werewolves and ghosts and mummies seemed threatening, a genuine possibility in a dark room or while walking around outside at night. All of that is gone now. Today, I find none of those things frightening. A good example of a movie I find scary now is Requiem for A Dream. Vampires and werewolves are fantasy. But drug addiction? Mental illness? Dying alone and abandoned? That’s some scary shit. But I still have a sentimental attachment to those old horror movies, and even if they don’t affect me in the way they used to, many are admirable simply for their cinematic qualities.

For my money, Bride of Frankenstein belongs right up there with Citizen Kane and Sunset Boulevard and other titles that are considered among the best American movies ever made. It has such a broad emotional range – horror, pathos, comedy – and James Whale had a grand old time slipping gay themes and jabs at the church past the censors. If all it had going for it was Ernest Thesiger’s performance, that would make it worth seeing, but it’s a treasure chest of cinematic gems and movie gold.

Horror movies don’t get much respect, and yet some of the most memorable moments in movie history come from them. Nosferatu rising from his coffin or the Phantom being unmasked are among the most well-known and enduring iconic images from the silent film era. All of the Universal monsters – Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, the wolf man, the mummy, the gill man from Creature from the Black Lagoon – are still a vivid part of our culture more than half a century after they first appeared on movie screens. Those movies feature scenes that have been burned into our consciousness: Colin Clive shouting, “It’s alive! It’s alive!”; Dracula’s “Listen to them ... the children of the night,” as he stands on that enormous staircase in his castle; Larry Talbot’s first transformation into a werewolf. These movies set the mold for cinematic horror in Hollywood and continue to be influential today. In the ‘50s and ‘60s in England, Hammer Studios put its own stamp on these horror icons, casting Christopher Lee as Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster and the mummy, Peter Cushing as the mad scientist or the monster-vanquishing hero, and Oliver Reed as the tragic title character in Curse of the Werewolf. But these were still reflections of the original visions that began at Universal.

In the 1950s, Hollywood replaced two-legged monsters with giant multi-legged monsters as the nuclear bomb turned harmless little bugs into giant nightmares. Then in 1960, Janet Leigh took a shower and there was a wave of twisted psychopaths. After Rosemary Woodhouse had a devilish time with her first pregnancy in 1968, Satan and his servants became the popular menace, possessing a little girl in The Exorcist, melting William Shatner and Ernest Borgnine in The Devil’s Rain, taking over a New York brownstone in The Sentinel, and generally raising hell all over the place. While Satan was doing his job, nature was going crazy in movies like Frogs and Sssssss and, of course, Jaws. The 1980s was a wonderful grab bag of horror. Werewolves and vampires made a comeback in movies like The Howling, An American Werewolf in London, Fright Night and The Lost Boys; there was a killer dog in Cujo, a killer family man in The Stepfather, demon-possessed zombies in the Evil Dead movies. It was a great decade. Things began to go downhill in the ‘90s, and only got worse after that.

Horror movies get less respect now than ever before. Part of the reason is that the genre has decayed in recent decades. There have been bright spots – movies like 2001's Session 9 and 2006's Pan’s Labyrinth spring to mind – but the genre seems to have dug a hole for itself, and rather than climbing out, it keeps digging.

I think a big part of the problem is that too many horror movies are made by people who don’t really understand why horror works when it works. The first mistake that trips most of them up is setting out to make a horror movie. They approach making a horror movie as if it were like making a cake, which requires certain ingredients in certain quantities. As strange as it sounds, I think horror filmmakers have seen way too many bad horror movies. They seem to think they need a certain amount of this, a bunch of that, a dollop of another thing. Horny teenagers, gore, sex – that kind of thing. That’s putting the horse-drawn hearse before the horse. It results in the kind of bland sameness that infects so many horror movies these days.

Director William Friedkin has said that he refused to approach The Exorcist as if it were a horror movie because he didn’t want to make just another horror movie. He approached it like any other movie. Shoving all thoughts of the horror genre aside, he decided to focus instead on the core elements of the story it told. He once said about himself, “I tend to be attracted to characters who are up against a wall with very few alternatives. And the film then becomes an examination of how they cope with very few options. And that's, I guess, what interests me in terms of human behavior.” That’s what happened with The Exorcist. It was a story about a woman horrified by what was happening to her daughter and helpless to do anything about it, a woman who quickly exhausted all her options and found herself up against a wall. That doesn’t sound like a horror movie, not at all – and that’s part of the reason why it works. Friedkin didn’t try to make a horror movie, and he ended up making one of the greatest horror movies ever made. One of the reasons it’s so scary is that we believe and care about the characters. Friedkin made a movie with a gripping, grueling story about people for whom we cared. If we hadn’t cared for them, the story wouldn’t have mattered much because we wouldn’t have cared about what happened to those people.

This attitude, I think, is absolutely essential in making a horror movie or writing a horror novel that works. Rather than setting out to write a horror story, start with story and character and let the horror evolve out of that.

The best horror movies – the ones that stay with us long after we see them – tend to be products of their time and to comment on or reflect those times in one way or another. In the 1930s, Universal Studios employed a lot of European immigrants, many of whom had fled the rise of Nazism in Germany. Glimpses of this can be seen in Universal’s horror films, especially the Frankenstein series. In those movies, we identify with the monster. He’s not only an outsider who doesn’t fit, he is despised by everyone. Even as a child, some of the most frightening images from those movies for me involved the angry, torch-bearing mobs out for blood. When they chase the monster, they are chasing us. Replace the creature made of cobbled-together corpse parts with a person of Jewish descent and suddenly, all fantasy melts away from these movies and they become vivid reflections of a very real time and place.

The big scares in the 1950s and onward were the possibility of a nuclear holocaust and fear of the communist boogieman. At the time, the general public was pretty ignorant of the true effects of a nuclear bomb. If they could be convinced that their children would be safe in an atomic blast by hiding under their school desks, then it’s pretty obvious they were in the dark. And they were afraid. The movies of the time reflected that fear. Who knows WHAT the bomb might do? they asked. Then they answered that question by exposing everyday insects like ants and spiders -- things we see around the house on a regular basis -- to nuclear bombs and growing them to monstrous sizes. These movies may not have the same effect today that they had then, when the mystery posed by the ominous bomb opened up all kinds of nightmarish possibilities.

When The Exorcist was released in December of 1973, it was a phenomenon, a blockbuster that created lines around the block. It made the news when moviegoers were so horrified by the graphic images that some of them became sick or even fainted. But people kept going back for more. The Exorcist tapped into something that many people recognized from their own lives. Parents were confused and frightened by the changes they were seeing in their children; drug use, sexual openness, political activism and a general angry anti-establishment attitude were making their children unrecognizable to them. When Regan MacNeil began spewing profanities and pea soup and going through frightening physical changes, those parents saw their own children, their own lives up there on the screen. To them, a child possessed by Satan made perfect sense, and they reacted to it strongly.

Jaws and the other “nature fights back” movies of that time period reflected a growing environmental consciousness. People were becoming aware of the damage we were doing to our environment and worrying about what the consequences of that damage might be. In the movies, the consequence was some pretty pissed off animals that were mad as hell and weren’t going to take it anymore. Jaws tapped into that so effectively that it made people afraid to get into their own bathtubs.

In 1979, Alien plugged into a timeless fear that spans all eras. It was set in outer space well into the future, but the discomfort and dread it aroused were as immediate as if the movie were shot yesterday in your own neighborhood. Is there anything more terrifying than the idea of some malignant thing growing inside you? Something you are unaware of and helpless to combat? Something that will kill you no matter what you do?

No matter what they are about on the surface, the best horror movies – like the best movies of all kinds – are those that touch us in a familiar and recognizable way. Whatever monsters or supernatural threats they may contain, they are about our lives right now, today, and the things that disrupt or threaten our lives. I don’t see horror movies doing that today. Instead, we get endless Saw sequels, or remakes of movies that weren’t any good the first time, like Friday the 13th or My Bloody Valentine. Who gives a damn about horny teenagers being slaughtered? Hell, spend a couple of hours with some of them and you might want to slaughter them yourself! Horror movies today are disconnected from us, from our lives and our experiences. They reflect nothing but the desire to have a blockbuster opening weekend that will make enough money to feed a small Third World country.

Another thing missing from horror movies today are horror movie stars. What comes immediately to mind when you hear the names Karloff or Lugosi? What images fill your head when you hear the names Christopher Lee or Vincent Price? The closest thing we have today is Anthony Hopkins, who not only gave us one of the greatest movie monsters in recent memory, Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs, but also starred in the haunting 1978 film Magic, played Van Helsing in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula and turned in a chilling performance in the recent remake of The Wolf Man.

Nobody worked harder to keep those old horror movie stars alive than Forrest J. Ackerman. As a boy, I got far more comfort and spiritual enrichment from Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine than I ever got from the bible. When I met Ackerman at a science fiction convention in 1984, it was like meeting Santa Claus – the real Santa Claus – and visiting his museum-like home a couple of years later was liking touring Santa’s toy factory at the North Pole. I was a boy the first time I read an interview with Ackerman, and I was dazzled when he said he’d created Famous Monsters of Filmland so fans could have Halloween all year long. What a concept! Halloween all year long! That was what I wanted. Most kids looked forward to getting married and having children and a white picket fence when they grew up. But when I grew up, I wanted to have Halloween all year long.

When Forrest J. Ackerman died in 2008, I was struck by how much he had influenced my life. All you have to do to see that influence is look around my house. It’s Halloween all year long here.

I suppose I’ve rambled enough. But I’ll leave you with a few suggestions. Even if you don’t have kids, carve a pumpkin, do a little decorating. If you do have kids, dress up along with them when you take them trick-or-treating. Turn out the lights and watch a scary movie with them – don’t forget how much kids love to be scared in a safe way (something adults do all too often in an effort to protect their children). This Halloween, frighten someone you love.