Welcome to another edition of The First Book That Terrified Me! Today’s guest post comes from Eric Beetner. Eric Beetner is the author of The Devil Doesn’t Want Me, Dig Two Graves, Stripper Pole At The End Of The World & the story collection, A Bouquet Of Bullets. He is co-author (with JB Kohl) of the novels One Too Many Blows To The Head and Borrowed Trouble. He has also written two novellas in the popular Fightcard series, Split Decision and A Mouth Full Of Blood. He lives in Los Angeles where he co-hosts the Noir At The Bar reading series. For more visit ericbeetner.blogspot.com. You can also follow him on Twitter at @EricBeetner.
My First Horror
My older sister was the big reader in the family. Still is. She devours books now at an incredible rate, and even as a young reader she tore through series like the Chronicles of Narnia in no time.
She turned to Stephen King around her freshman year of high school. I started poking around her copies of The Shining and Christine because I was a movie guy, or as much as I could be one in the 7th grade.
I began to be selective in what I read from her collection. I skipped to the room 237 scene in The Shining. Scary on the page as well as the film. I decided to give some of King’s short stories a try. I started with Skeleton Crew.
King is a fantastic and, I think, underrated short story writer and I’d still to this day rather read his shorts than one of his thousand page tomes.
Skeleton Crew contains a whole bushel of great shorts, but the one that got me was The Monkey. Someone at the publisher must have really been affected by this story too because the image of that smiling, dead-eyed mechanical simian adorns the cover of Skeleton Crew, despite the collection containing nineteen short stories, one novella and two poems.
The story is one of those ‘make an ordinary object terrifying’ tales of a man who cannot escape the cruel torture of a wind-up monkey who seems to be capable of evil doings. It’s one of those stories that I felt silly being scared by. But there’s just something about it.
Horror on the page is so vastly different than horror on the screen. As a film student and lover of all things cinema I am not one of those “The book is always better.” types.
But horror has some very specific proven methods of working that caters directly to the page over the screen. To evoke terror and chills, versus pure shock or revulsion, the game is to let the reader or viewer fill in the gaps with their own imagination, knowing full well that whatever an audience can conjure in their mind is worse than what you can describe or shoot with special effects.
From the shark in Jaws to the spirits of Paranormal Activity, the films that flat-out scare the bejeebers out of us are ones that keep much of the action off screen, and off screen means in our minds. When all you have are black letters on a page, a reader has a lot of filling in to do, and boy do we. Even my young mind could imagine being menaced by one of the toys in my life. And to take something so simple and commonplace and change into an object that I will never be able to look at the same way again, even now nearly thirty years later, is amazing.
The story is unassuming. There isn’t any blood to speak of, just the main character, Hal, and his lifelong battle with the monkey in question as it seems to be the harbinger of all things tragic in his life. People die when the monkey is around, and he can’t get rid of it. It keeps coming back, even after he threw it down the old abandoned well on his uncle’s property.
“I hate you,” he hissed at it. He wrapped his hand around its loathsome body, feeling the nappy fur crinkle. It grinned at him as he held it up in front of his face. “Go on!” he dared it, beginning to cry for the first time that day. He shook it. The poised cymbals trembled minutely. The monkey spoiled everything good. Everything. “Go on, clap them! Clap them!” The monkey only grinned.
“Go on and clap them!” His voice rose hysterically. “Fraidycat, fraidycat, go on and clap them/ I dare you! DOUBLE DARE YOU/”
Its brownish-yellow eyes. Its huge gleeful teeth.
He threw it down the well then, mad with grief and terror. He saw it turn over once on its way down, a simian acrobat doing a trick, and the sun glinted one last time on those cymbals. It struck the bottom with a thud, and that must have jogged its clockwork, for suddenly the cymbals did begin to beat. Their steady, deliberate, and tinny banging rose to his ears, echoing and fey in the stone throat of the dead well: jang-jang jang-jang–
Hal clapped his hands over his mouth, and for a moment he could see it down there, perhaps only in the eye of imagination . . . lying there in the mud, eyes glaring up at the small circle of his boy’s face peering over the lip of the well (as if marking that face forever), lips expanding and contracting around those grinning teeth, cymbals clapping, funny wind-up monkey.
So, The Monkey was the first story to really get under my skin. It also kicked off a phase of reading horror stories because somehow, I guess I liked to have my skin crawl like that. If you haven’t read Skeleton Crew, I do recommend it. You’ll never look at a wind-up monkey the same way again.
Thank you Eric! Please come back next Tuesday for yet another edition of The First Book That Terrified Me!
