Cynthia J. Miller - Terrifying Texts: Essays on Books of Good and Evil in Horror Cinema

ALSO EDITED BY CYNTHIA J. MILLER and A. BOWDOIN VAN RIPER

Divine Horror: Essays on the Cinematic Battle Between the Sacred and the Diabolical (2017)

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-3374-9

2018 Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper.All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Front cover image 2018 iStock

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com

For everyone who has learned that its wise
to judge some books by their covers.

This collection owes its existence to the efforts and good will of many individuals, from colleagues whose work provided inspiration and encouragement to loved ones who graciously accepted less than our full attention and offered words of support during long days spent battling the horrors of the book. To all of them, we give our thanks. Additionally, thanks to our 19 fine contributors, for their energy, scholarship, and creativity.

CYNTHIA J. MILLER and A. BOWDOIN VAN RIPER

That book lies!!

Truth lies fact fantasy our complex, and often contested, relationship with books shapes our reality. Books are reveredand fearedfor their ability to affect the minds and hearts of humankind. We collect them, pore over them, commit their passages to memory, censor them, and even attempt to banish them from our midst, lest they lead us to ruin.

Indeed, for better or worse, we are all people of the book. Perhaps not in the sacred sense, as possessors of divine texts revealing knowledge imparted by God,

Our engrained (though limited) perception of the book and its uses has a long history. For generations, we have relied on texts to serve as faithful means of making, maintaining, and communicating knowledgeas predictable, immutable, immortal containers of information about our own nature and that of the world. Adrian Johns argues that [e]ven the brisk skepticism we may express about certain printed materials rests on it, inasmuch as we feel confident that we can readily and consistently identify what it is that we are scorning. Authorship and the means of production both strive to erase their own presence in order to craft an air of authority. Thus, the printed worda product of complex social processesbecomes disengaged from its origins and reified, and with it, our understandings and portrayals of knowledge and knowing.

Still, books are social toolscurated artifacts of societys accumulated knowledgemade all the more potent by this reification. John Feather grounds his discussions of the book in society in the web of values and relationships, material and abstract, shaped by books as both artifacts and symbols, noting that the significance that is attached to books extends far beyond their functional role as containers of texts. We instinctively resist disorder and the uncertainty it introduces in our social and intellectual lives, and yet, only through the confrontation of difference do we move forward. Those who possessed and controlled formal, written knowledge met challenges on several fronts: from mass culture that mimicked, yet threatened to cheapen, the power and status of the book on one side; from folkways and oral traditionsOld World knowledge based in tradition and the supernaturalon another; and from new knowledge and ideas on still another. Dangerous knowledge threatened to introduce chaos into order, through controversial textspamphlets, pages, letters, diaries, and book-length worksthat questioned and confronted established, codified understandings of the social and natural worlds. Each of these eroded the cultural and intellectual establishment, introducing the unknown and challenging belief in the comprehensibility of all knowledge.

Individuals and societies thus employed the book to map their social and cultural identities, as well as their mental universes; yet, at the same time, they were constrained by it. Access, in terms of both economics and the socio-political control of materials, determined what written texts were read, by whom, and within what circumstances, while intellectual and creative conventionsas well as the construction and shifting tides of tasteset the stage for how material was received, interpreted, and discussed. This tension inherent in the experience of using books is perhaps one of the defining elements of Western society. Those who challenge the privileged status of booksquestioning their truth and denying their authorityshine a powerful light on their ability to shape our collective notions of how the world works. Lies are exposed, agendas are revealed, and histories are revised, and yet, even these do not wholly erase the influence of the books original form. While written into being by ordinary men and women, the ideas that animate volumes, diaries, scrolls, and other texts develop lives and destinies of their own; and reality, once conjured, is difficult to vanquish.

Depictions of books in tales of the fantastic draw on these centuries of experience, presenting exaggerated versions of what books can be and do, while simultaneously subverting our expectations of how to interact with them. Magical books that depart from the day-to-day realities of the printed and bound page cluster in the comic-fantasy genre when the effects of the departure are benignwhen a hack adventure-story writers friend is sucked into the world of his latest poorly conceived epic, for example, or a frustrated novelists main character comes to flesh-and-blood lifeand in the realm of horror when the effects are malignant. Horror stories destabilize our perceptions of books in diverse ways, plunging us into a world where they can no longer be casually relied upon and rendering the seemingly familiar suddenly unfamiliar.

Books are, in the everyday world, essentially passive devices: tools for preserving and organizing knowledge so that readers can access it at will. Absorbing knowledge from the book (by reading) and applying it to the world (by taking action on it) are fundamentally separate processes. The spell books, grimoires, and similar magical tomes that fill horror films narrow this separation, however, merging reading and action into a single, seamless process. Reading aloud from the pages of a magical book canwithout any further action on the part of the readersummon beings of unimaginable power, open gateways between worlds or dimensions, and orchestrate magical forces capable of reshaping the world at the readers whim. Sutter Cane, the horror writer at the heart of In the Mouth of Madness (1994) seemingly disappears from our world, only to be found in a town that appears on no mapone drawn from, and shaped by, the words in his best-selling novelswhere he can reshape reality at will. Words read from a page are, in extreme cases, capable of completely unweaving the fabric of reality. The plot of