Mostly I Scare Myself...

            My brother is so hard to scare. Really, he is. No horror movies scare him, no ghost stories chill his blood, no paranormal show makes him want to sit in a whitewashed room lit by a hundred LED bulbs and wait until morning. I can’t say I’m not the same way. I’ve read so many haunted house and ghost stories that I’m surprised I’m still a sane person. (In the broadest sense of the term.) Rarely do I find myself trembling beneath my skin and wishing I had not picked up a book filled with ghost stories. When I was in grade school, I devoured books like Scary Stories and its sequels. You know what I’m talking about, the Alvin Schwarz books designed to strike fear into the average middle-schooler’s heart and leave them quivering underneath their bedcovers, a flashlight in hand, the light on, and their eyes either jammed shut or wide open. Those stories never really scared me. Frankly, nothing really scares me. Startles, yes; the easiest way to startle me is to stand somewhere I won’t expect to see you and stare at me, waiting for me to discover you. And when I do:

            Yeah, I can’t say I’m proud of that.

            Really, though, reading something “scary” has an effect on me equivalent to a really annoying person trying to tell me a story that will “freak me out.” The type that kind of sits forward in the dark and likes to exaggerate the essentially scary parts and only succeeds at dropping a cheese bomb. Been there, done that, over it. Let’s get into the really freaky stuff. Stuff that will make my un-freak-out-able brother want to sleep in that whitewashed room. Stuff I can’t ignore as it floats around my head and asks to be written. Stuff like…

            Charles Dickens.

            DON’T LAUGH AT ME.

            No, seriously. Have you ever read his ghost stories? “The Haunted House” is a little slower and doesn’t make much sense sometimes, but that’s really the only one I’ve read that hasn’t freaked me out (too much). Just try reading “The Signalman” or “The Murder Trial” or “The Chimes” at night by yourself, tell me your organs won’t clench inward. Yeesh.

            (By the way, “The Murder Trial” has to be my favorite one. “The Signalman” runs a close second, though.)

            When you stop and think about it, today’s “horror,” today’s “ghost stories,” today’s stuff like that...well, I think it tries too hard. Let me use the movie Mama as an example. (And if you won’t let me use it, too bad; I’m going to anyway.)

            The storyline of Mama is the classic “ghost story” that we all know being told at campfires growing up. Person in some distant time had something tragic happen, something went wrong and the person died with unfinished business, this unfinished business leads the person’s ghost to attach itself to someone/something/somewhere, and some unsuspecting skeptic intrudes and eventually has to come to terms with the ghost’s existence and quest so they can help the spirit find rest. Sometimes new elements are introduced to make it “zazzy.”

            Well, the zazz has run dry. I venture to say it ran dry quite a while ago.

            Charles Dickens doesn’t follow these rules. His stories are freaky because you don’t know what to expect. The cliché got ground up by a carriage wheel in some London gutter after Dickens threw it from his window and watched it fall, laughing the whole while. He decided to take every ghost story and make it something people wouldn’t expect. Even “The Haunted House” had moments when I wanted to close my Kindle’s case and lay back in broad daylight until I had the nerve to move and not see something in every shadow, mirror, window, etc.; and THAT, my friends, is where I’m heading: prodigiousness. Unexpectedness. Unforeseeable turns of event.

            In other words, throw open the windows of your mind, and toss out the cliché.

            Let me give you an example: A story like “The Signalman” written by someone on today’s ghost story market would have the signalman be the person that gets killed by a ghost and have the ghost come after the guy who was keeping the signalman company. But in Charles Dickens’ story, the “ghosts” that the signalman was seeing were actually foreshadowing events of his own oncoming death, witnessed by someone who couldn’t see or hear any of what the signalman saw or heard, and not due to ignorance or disbelief like in today’s market. The narrator—our “someone”—simply happened to stumble into something that he had no real place in, and when he befriended the signalman he knew of the stuff despite the fact that he couldn’t see or hear it. (Which, by the way, is partly why I had a hard time swallowing when reading this one.) All these rules that Charles Dickens defied—unknowingly or not—has set a standard that I hope to follow in my own writing, no matter if I do happen to pen a ghost story or anything else.

            Hence my title of “Repudiator.”

            Like Charles Dickens, I throw open the windows of my mind and let fall every cliché we as a culture and a people have been suckered into believing as “good storytelling,” or “originality,” or anything else stupid and mundane and Mainstream-Instant-Oatmeal (MIO) and  *gag* accepted. I mean, why are they accepted??? WHY? Why must every guy be beautiful and buff and brooding-but-secretly-deep, and the women weak-but-strong-in-other-ways mice and also beautiful and annoying and whiny and—OH, I CAN’T TAKE IT.

            Anyway.

            (breathe)

            Where was I going with this? Oh, right; ghost stories and Charles Dickens.

Yeah. Like this.

            Recently my mind has established that it will not write novels for the moment

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            But it will manage to write short stories, which happen to be my Achilles’ heel of the Writingverse. No, let me rephrase that. Short stories happen to be my only Achilles’ heel in ALL of the Writingverse—that, by the way, is not bragging. I’m not that great at songwriting (I can’t explain that), literature and life-based fiction is completely beyond my comprehension of how to accomplish (I blame the bolt of Wonder I was hit with), articles are just now starting to form themselves for me (which is weird, seeing as I was opposed to writing journalism in any way for a long time), and I suck toaster at exegesis (I refuse to conform). Also, I fail miserably at limericks. The man from Peru shoulders no responsibility here.

            And despite all my misgivings and fear about short stories, they have a tendency of late to fill my head rather prolifically. Charles Dickens serves as a major inspiration to the ghost story that so desperately panders for my attention.

            So, despite all this talk of ghost stories, I mostly scare myself. All in the name of research, of course. At the most inconvenient time to be freaked out (alone, downstairs, in the dark), I think about something cliché from a horror story and automatically make it original. Translation: I take something predictable and scare the living nutcakes out of myself making it “original.” (Yeah, thanks, originality. Sometimes you suck.)

            All in the name of research, of course.

            And then, when my spine couldn’t possibly be tingling any more than it already is, I put the What Ifs into my head. Like, “What if a bony hand reached out from this corner and grabbed me? No, that’s cliché. Make the fingers long and thin, with no fingernails, like nasty spider legs, and gross gray. NO. PURE WHITE. And it doesn’t grab me and drag me somewhere, no. The skin is so cold I jump ten feet because the hand also went THROUGH MY ARM.”

            Or the lovely window mind-games: “What if I looked out of the window and saw something that screamed at me? No, too cliché. I wouldn’t see anything at first. What would happen is (a) the grass by the trees would rustle, something would appear and disappear like an animal, then reappear closer in shadows, then closer, then closer, and all I would see as the motion-detecting light turned on would be two white eye reflections at the edge of the shadow, where something should be able to be seen. And then, a scream…BEHIND ME.”

            And it’s all in the name of RESEARCH.

            My mind’s windows are open, but sometimes I’d like to close them. Gently, mind you. Any shattered panes would let in something…unwarranted. Like Mainstream-Instant-Oatmeal. However, if Charles Dickens taught me anything, it’s that the original, despite what anyone says or how weird it may seem to the drivel-eaters—the originality in our stories happens to be that story’s truth. And the only thing we could ever hope to convey as writers is the truth in the stories that reveal themselves to us.

            And if that truth happens to scare us white as ghosts…

            Well, so be it. Who am I to discourage creativity at its most visceral?