Storytellersunplugged

With Mother’s Day coming up, I’ve been thinking a lot about how my mom’s choices made me into the adult, the father and the writer I’ve become. (Thinking is easier and cheaper than shopping.)

And aside from concluding that my mom is better than your mom, I realized that she gave me a gift I don’t suppose many horror writers really ever got from their parents and other family. My mom didn’t just teach me to read, or encourage me to write, draw or make music; she never once, to my recollection, discouraged me from reading or writing horror, and never tried to make me feel guilty about honestly expressing myself, beyond her inveterate critical comment, “I think I’m getting a migraine.”

Many reading this might disagree, but I believe that much of horror lit’s inferiority complex begins in the home, and it’s deeply rooted in the writer’s psyche, by the time we start making friends and picking fights on message boards.

We all grew up reading the same anthologies in the 80’s boom, and each and every one was prefaced with variants, sometimes elegant, often pugnacious, on the defense of horror; proclaiming its prehistoric pedigree and its sneaky presence in so many mainstream classics, and maybe taking a stab at the catharsis argument, or a more daring poke at the real appeal such atrocious stories could offer to damaged/enlightened souls, and the subtle, superhuman powers conferred on them thereby. We shook our heads at the ignorance of our elders for banning EC Comics and marginalizing and editing Cronenberg and Carpenter movies, but we must have internalized the judgment on horror as frivolous and morbid at best, and corrupting trash, at worst.

Reading Stephen King, I have always wrestled with the paradox of how the most successful writer of all time could so plainly feel a deep stigma about doing what he loved to do. But King’s predicament always seemed weirder to me than it might to most, because I started reading King at age 8.

When I complained to my third-grade teacher about the lame in-class reading books, she gave me The Shining. She knew I loved monsters because I drew them on every piece of schoolwork, and she knew my mom, because I attended the school where my mom taught (never in her class, but got beat up monthly, just the same, thanks, Mom!). She did not clear it with my mom specifically, but she also took me to see Dawn Of The Dead and bought me my first Fangoria. (And yes, there were times when I wished Ms. Robbins was my mom. Two stupid times.)

My mom was not into horror at all; she loves anything heavier than Kurt Vonnegut would put her into catatleptic fits. I once tricked her into going to see Children Of The Corn, and she had a continuous panic attack from the opening meat slicer scene to the ludicrous flaming tomato god climax, but she didn’t drag me out, and she never asked me why I couldn’t stop laughing at the gory bits.

I hear a lot of other writers talk about how their families have problems with their work. Some of us who come from deeply religious backgrounds or conservative parts of the country often say that they have to lie or even hide what they write about, and while I think this conflict might give more of an edge to the work than otherwise, it often leads to a sameness of tone, that makes so much of modern horror collectively, I think, kind of a bummer.

I don’t think even a plurality of us came from physically abusive homes, and yet child abuse is a horror staple as ubiquitous as the showoff serial killer and the sexy kickass vampire hunter who’s also a vampire. I won’t say so much, but I’ll ask the peanut gallery, if their families disapprove of what they do, and how they cope, and most importantly, how it affects their writing.
But oh yeah, I was talking about my mom…
My childhood was messy even by 70’s standards, and I am told that I was a very angry kid. She claims not to remember big chunks of it, but I remember always feeling loved, despite all the awful things I did. (My worst fallout from reading The Shining was, I called another kid an “officious little prick” at school; he broke a clipboard over my head, and I stabbed him with a pencil… but he later claimed that the “big words” hurt the worst.)
My mom never spanked me; the worst punishment I could get was solitary confinement in the bathroom, until I turned twelve and she found my Walkman and comic books. She worried about me, but she didn’t try to medicate or change me. We went to therapy for a while, and it was kind of fun, and we went to church a few times in my whole childhood, always a different one. Maybe it was because she was feeling spiritually insecure, but I sometimes think she just wanted me to see what it was like. Now, she irregularly attends a nondenominational syncretic church with surfing monks, because nothing about it gives her a headache.
We traveled a lot on the cheap when I was a kid, and backpacked for weeks at a time in the Sierras. I read a King-sized novel almost every day, ate a box of Captain Crunch on the road (the only time I got sugary cereals was on the trail), and I learned to respect total silence, and to put complex streams of thought together over hours and days. I brought that peace back with me, and I can still have it, whenever I need it.
She seldom put her foot down about what entertainment I could consume, and sharpened my wiles with her feeble efforts to thwart me staying up all night watching Godzilla movies, or sneaking into Scanners or The Thing, instead of Popeye or Megaforce.
What I guess I’m trying to say is, my mom somehow nurtured my creative adult self without ever trying to tame it, so I never had to defend what I loved to do to anyone, until I started writing for money. I would never have become the writer I am today, I believe, if I were made to feel I was just printing the devil’s toilet paper.
Thanks, mom. (How’s your head?)