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Great Plains Quarterly Great Plains Studies, Center for

2009

Open To Horror The Great Plains Situation in Contemporary Thrillers By E. E. Knight And By And

A. B. Emrys University of Nebraska at Kearney

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Emrys, A. B., "Open To Horror The Great Plains Situation in Contemporary Thrillers By E. E. Knight And By Douglas Preston And Lincoln Child" (2009). Great Plains Quarterly. 1199. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/1199

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Great Plains Studies, Center for at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. has been accepted for inclusion in Great Plains Quarterly by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. OPEN TO HORROR THE GREAT PLAINS SITUATION IN CONTEMPORARY THRILLERS BY E. E. KNIGHT AND BY DOUGLAS PRESTON AND LINCOLN CHILD

A. B. EMRYS

From the agoraphobic prairie where the father but evoke the Great Plains then and now. The of Willa Cather's Antonia kills himself, to the Plains' presence is well documented in liter­ claustrophobic North Dakota town of Argus ary studies of major and minor Plains authors, devastated by storm in Louise Erdrich's "Fleur," and in overviews such as Diane Quantic's The to Lightning Flat, the grim home of Jack Twist Nature of the Place.! Much less attention has in Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain," been paid to the Great Plains in popular fiction much Great Plains literature is situational, beyond the study of Western novels. Two con­ placing drama in the context of histori­ temporary novels, both part of widely popular calor contemporary setting. Isolation, fierce series that are well received critically, demon­ weather, and inherent pressures on survival strate how well the Great Plains' physical situ­ remain primary, and the Plains is a character in ation itself, as well as its own history of bloody itself that appears as a presence, whether fore­ behavior, dialogues with classic components of grounded or ghostly, in works that cannot help . This receptivity to the syntax of horror enables these writers' contemporary horror thrillers to generate dialogue between their Key Words: horror, literature, Kansas, Nebraska, genre conventions and Great Plains' history , and geography. E. E. Knight's post-apocalyptic Choice of the Cat (2004) chiefly dialogues with A. B. Emrys' critical work on popular fiction has Plains past, evoking the elements of frontier appeared in The Journal of Popular Culture, The and pioneer Westerns in a speculative context Popular Culture Review, Storytelling: A Critical that also relies on Plains space. Still Life with Journal of Popular Narrative, and Clues: A Journal (2003), by the writing duo of Douglas of Detection. She teaches writing and a class on horror Crows literature at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. Preston and Lincoln Child, establishes a more wholly satisfying interaction with both Plains physicality and culture that becomes a narra­ [GPQ 29 (Spring 2009): 121-27] tive of healing as well as violence. Together,

121 122 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, SPRING 2009 the two novels illustrate how receptive the Great Plains situation is to a variety of fiction categories.

CORN AND CAVERNS IN KANSAS

In Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's Still Life with Crows, a dying small town surrounded by a thousand square miles of corn may be cursed by a past massacre, blighted by genetic plant experimentation, or simply stalked by a serial killer who is one of the town's own. This writing pair links three major narrative arcs of horror-mad science, supernatural events, and stalker/slasher murders-directly to the his­ tory and landscape of the Plains. The novels of Preston and Child offer many insider plea­ sures through references to the great writers of horror, and no fan could fail to recognize the opening of Still Life with Crows, with its sinister, rustling corn, as a reference to Stephen King. Douglas Preston confirmed to me that this is their most King-like book. 2 King was one of the first modern horror writers to utilize the isolation of small towns FIG. 1. Cover of Still Life with Crows. Reprinted as sites for sins of the past and for present-day by permission of Grand Central Publishing. terrors. Though his principal setting is Maine, King also perceived the possibilities of the Plains. His 1976 story "Children of the Corn"3 Its most effective scenes are chases through was written after King's travel through central the almost sentient corn to a clearing where a Nebraska by car to and from Colorado where he grisly crucifixion has taken place. The corn­ set .4 King said in a interview worship hardly rings true, however, even as a discussion of horror settings, "I also really like speculation about the Midwest, since conser­ Nebraska. It's made a tremendous impression vative evangelism would be highly unlikely on me. All those wide-open spaces and that to take such a pagan turn. King was right to big, big sky. Very strange. Very Lovecraftian."s make the protagonist a tourist, since that was In King's story a quarreling couple taking the how King himself knew the Plains. Preston and back roads gets lost not far from Grand Island. Child adapted from this story the eerie corn­ They stumble across a dead town, Gatlin, whose fields that conceal stalkers and reveal gruesome church has been strangely transformed. This murders in sudden clearings. They reset the discovery is framed by ranting radio preachers story in a Kansas town far more authentically the tourists have heard, as the couple deduces detailed than King's, while infusing it with that the town's congregation has begun wor­ their characteristic broad spectrum of horror shipping "He Who Walks Behind the Rows" plots. and cutting down its followers at the ripe age Preston and Child did not pick up the of nineteen, as well as sacrificing any heathen religion-run-wild theme, though they make trespassers they happen upon. To some extent, an oblique allusion to it through another King the story reads as a Great Plains Wicker Man. connection. In King's first novel, , the OPEN TO HORROR 123 title character is abused and isolated by her disappear the same way, surprising and massa­ fanatically religious mother, who would have cring the band of outlaws, one of whom survives been at home in "Children of the Corn." Preston to tell the tale of the "ghost warriors" and how the and Child rescue this child in Still Life, in the last-killed "Forty-Fiver" cursed the land around guise of a goth girl named Corrie, whom their the mounds where the attack took place.s detective saves, in a literal sense, from a drunken The mystery of where the tribal warriors came but unreligious mother while also enabling her from and disappeared to is something the novel's to get out of the town where she's a rejected principal detective, FBI special agent Pendergast, scapegoat. Still Life also resolves the situation investigates by means of Chong Ran, a Bhutanese of a second, more severely rejected and isolated mental discipline that creates the past so vividly child abused by fanatic purity. The double res­ as to provide a "memory crossing" (227, 240) to cues develop the tale of violence into a narrative the scene of the massacre. In doing so, Pendergast that also includes healing and resolution that erases the present-day cornfields and replaces eventually extends to the town as well. them with the Plains of the past. Preston and Child have always written an interesting blend of the three main focuses of First the light returned. Then the grass horror-mad science, supernatural, and stalker. rolled over the landscape, virgin tallgrass The core of their novels turns out to be pur­ prairie dotted with prairie aster, wild poppies, suit through labyrinthine spaces, including in cornflowers, rocketweed, and lupine. Then other novels the subbasement of the he piled back the bronze mountains of cloud, of Natural History (), abandoned subways the rocky outcrops, the shady creek wander­ tunnels beneath Manhattan (), and a ing free across the Great Plains. Now other lost Anasazi village hidden in tortuous canyons things began to take shape: a herd of buffalo (). 6 Their supernatural overtones in the far distance; shallow water pans blaz­ turn out chiefly to have rational, if bizarre, ing silver in the late afternoon light; and explanations, and often function as red her­ everywhere an infinite array of wild grasses, rings to build suspense. Mad science has a more undulating from horizon to horizon like a complex role in their books, occupying much great rippling sea of green. (228-29) important space in Relic and Reliquary, and much less in Thunderhead. The past comes to life in his meditation, but In Still Life, the fourth book in this linked the present Plains occupy most of the novel. group of novels, their plays on all three areas Mad science, for instance, appears in the are intimately connected to Plains history and guise of bioengineered corn. Medicine Creek geography. In the dying small town of Medicine is competing for an experimental site that Creek, Kansas, the supernatural atmosphere would provide desperately needed jobs. The stems from local violent history variously academic scientist in charge of the project is referred to as the "Medicine Creek Massacre" an obnoxious snob who ignores the dangers or "The Curse of the Forty-Fives."7 This event of the proposed planting; he makes a perfect had taken place as settlement began to roll victim in the series of grotesque killings, while beyond the eastern Kansas frontier. As retali­ his murder and the competition between towns ation for tribal raids during the Civil War, a seem to offer motive. He is, indeed, another of vigilante group called the Forty-Fives formed the characteristic speculators Diane Quantic in Dodge, Kansas, consisting of "murderers identified as a major character group in Plains and crooks pushed out of settled towns." Their literature, who have come to the grasslands cowardly attacks on the women and children of solely for profit.9 Here both violent, unresolved Cheyenne villages provoked a lethal counter­ history and contemporary science as speculator attack by a mysterious band of Cheyenne war­ contextualize and offer possible explanations riors who seemed to appear from nowhere and for the murders. 124 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, SPRING 2009

But Plains past and present merge as the The dark brown wall bore down on town authors resolve the mysteries and reveal the after town, engulfing one after the other.... horror by descending literally within the land The great mountain chain of clouds flat­ for the final climactic stalking by and of the tened against the tropopause, spreading out perpetrator. Medicine Creek is the site not into a series of massive, anvil-shaped thun­ only of sinister, isolating cornfields and the derheads .... On the underside of the storm, spooky Grow-Bain turkey plant with its "blood ugly, bulging mammatus pouches appeared: room"-both scenes of murder in the novel­ bellwethers for heavy rainfall, hail, wind­ but also of Krauss's Kaverns, a family-owned bursts, and tornadoes. (288-89) tourist attraction discovered in 1901 and fallen into obscurity. The caverns' history includes The storm's description and progress occupies moonshine wars between rival families from several pages as it becomes a metaphoric char­ rival towns that complicate the novel's present­ acter taking part in the final stalking. It mirrors day interactions. But simply because the towns­ above the uncharted labyrinth below as an out­ people have always known about the caves, of-control force of nature. they are taken for granted. Everyone in town In connecting the three driving motives of has seen them at one time or another, gener­ horror to the Great Plains, Preston and Child ally as children, and forgotten them. When reveal an acute awareness of the history, geog­ the detective's local assistant, Corrie, reenters raphy, and climate of the Plains and the poten­ the cavern called "The Giant's Library," "She tial of each for violence. They, like Knight, are remembered that, as a kid, she'd thought the highly sensitive to place, and their work features place really was a giant's library" (273). Other an amount of description unusual in action sites within the caverns include "The Krystal fiction. Preston has ridden Coronado's route Kathedral," "The Bottomless P!t," and "The in and is a member of the Long Infinity Pool." Riders' Guild, a group that has ridden 1,000 The roadside hokiness of the names helps to miles or more on horseback, and the two authors obscure the importance of the place until late have traveled together to research locations.lO in the book, as the detective, his assistant, and Still Life is the only one of their highly situ­ the sheriff each separately grasps the implica­ ational novels to be set in the Plains, yet they tions of place. The limestone caverns beneath demonstrate considerable sensitivity to histori­ the town become the final site of horror and cal and contemporary nuances of place. Most solution as the killer stalks the sheriff and his notable is their classic confrontation of a town deputies, as well as Pendergast and his local in tension with its environment. Medicine Creek assistant. As in many a work by Poe and his is one of those Plains towns that grew up with disciple H. P. Lovecraft, all is revealed once insufficient means to sustain itself, and one that we descend below, even the curse of the Forty­ has shrunk but not yet given up. The inhabitants Fives. The caves also ironically save the town, believe corn, evoking the Plains as garden, will drawing national attention not only to the save them, but in fact it is a natural formation, killings but to the spectacular natural forma­ Krauss's Kaverns, that enables the detectives tion, which becomes a magnet for geologists, to solve the murder and the town to survive. spelunkers, and tourists. Once its shame The caverns certainly are a typical Preston and is revealed and cleansed, Medicine Creek Child subterranean site, but one as perfectly revives. organic to its setting as the museum basement To further enhance the Plains context of in Relic. The overlay of tourist attraction on this the climax, the final descent takes place not natural wonder well represents human attempts merely on a dark and stormy night, but during to limit and control Plains vastness. At the same a hell's-a-poppin' force-3 Plains dust storm rages time, its past as a moonshine operation and its aboveground. present as the secret home of a shunned child OPEN TO HORROR 125 exhibits the constrictions of small-town culture uses the common oceanic prairie metaphor to that attempt even in the present to control its infuse a futuristic western Nebraska situation residents, including the misfit goth girl, Corrie. with Plains history once more. Ultimately, these overlays fail as the newly uncovered vastness beneath Medicine Creek The Sand Dunes, September: Stretching shifts from its dark secret to its saving grace. north from the Platte River is the rolling, empty expanse of Nebraska's dunes .... SAVING THE FUTURE PLAINS FROM ALIENS They start to the west, and like the ocean, the great rollers are found the farthest out, E. E. Knight's Vampire Earth series is The Red thousand-foot-high, wind-rounded ridges a Badge of Courage as written by H. P. Lovecraft, mile across and ten miles long, almost all one jacket quote reads. Knight himself has said running east-west according to the prevail­ he originally created this world for his gaming ing winds. East from the great ridges are group, and he called it "sort of Omega Man as smaller hills of varying squiggled shapes but realized by George A. Romero with French still mostly long and thin. These gradually Resistance flair."ll He has often emphasized fade off into tiny steep hillocks, as the great that his series is setting-driven. Choice of the rollers of the Atlantic turn into the chop of Cat, the second of the series, takes place half the English Channel, So like little waves are a century into occupation by shape-shifting these hills that the residents use a nautical invaders, the Kur, who bring with them horrific term for them: choppers .... Game is plenti­ alien creatures, especially the deadly "reap­ ful, mule deer bound through the long grass ers," who turn out to be the origin of vampire like giant jackrabbits.... But the residents of legends. In it, the Plains, including Nebraska, the Dunes ride with rifles for reasons other have become a gulag policed by the Kur. The than shooting game. isolating distances provide protection up to They hunt the minions of Kur.1 2 a point through traditional western indepen­ dence and summary justice, while the former The "Trekkers" of the sand dunes live in capital in Lincoln is run by Kurian lords and nomadic wagon encampments that move with their horrific creatures. The Kur occupy with their cattle herds; they call their rolling settle­ a vengeance the role of Quantic's "speculator"; ments after their brands. As Knight's series they have come literally to reap the enslaved hero, the half-Sioux David Valentine scouts descendents of settlers and ranchers. alien activity with his "cat" partner, they A chief beauty of Knight's series lies in his attempt to warn a group of Trekkers about an vividly depicted geographical introductions impending assault on the dunes camps, who to chapters in which setting shifts to a new have been immune to Kurian rule through locale, reinforcing place as character. Knight's their isolation and mobility. series settings begin near the boundary waters, In the narrative of attack and defense that move to the Ozarks, and eventually range follows, the Trekkers literally circle the wagons, as far south as New Orleans and as far west this time not against tribal warriors but turn­ as Oregon, with a detour to Jamaica. These coat "jacks" and the aliens' most fearsome several-page detailed portraits are both lyrical weapon, the vampire-like reapers. It is here that and dynamic, making place very much an actor the ready dialogue between Western formula in the ensuing narrative of fierce resistance, led and horror elements operates most clearly. In by who have been physically altered interviews, Knight has directly acknowledged by a more benevolent group of the aliens into his debt to the syntax of frontier fiction. "wolves," "cats," and "bears" with heightened senses and strength. Knight's introduction to Probably the single genre that most influ­ the Nebraska Sandhills in Choice of the Cat ences VE [Vampire Earth] is Westerns, oddly 126 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, SPRING 2009

enough. Like Warring States Samurai stuff The mechanics of the attack, however, and Pirate-age books, Westerns {and my dys­ clearly parallel Mad Max-style scavenged weap­ topic post-apocs} are stories of either a lawless onry and salvaged vehicles, well suited to the land or one where justice is decided by the isolated and wide-open Plains. Similarly, the strong. There's plenty of room for your hero central Nebraska train system, from McCook to be heroic in that kind of settingP to Grand Island, is being used by the Kurian Order's quisling soldiers, among them a new John G. Cawelti, in his study of the Western's cadre flying a "twisted cross" or swastika. basic ingredients, The Six-Gun Mystique, goes Even in a future ruled by aliens, getting across further in connecting geography and Western Nebraska is an issue: Val and his partner theme. assume local identities and hitch rides to gather information. It is after jumping off a train near Four characteristics of the Great Plains Ogallala that Val and his companion wade topography have been especially important: the Platte and make their way to the Trekkers. its openness, its aridity and general inhos­ Grand Island, Kearney, and other Nebraska pitality to human life, its great extremes towns are mentioned on the route. of light and climate, and paradoxically, its Ultimately, the most speculative {and least grandeur and beauty. These topography Western} parts of the novel take least advan­ features create an effective backdrop for the tage of landscape, as they occur in the all-but­ action of the Western because theyexem­ destroyed cities in eastern Nebraska. Ruins are plify in visual images the thematic conflict an integral site of horror, both ruins from the between civilization and savagery and its past and ruins newly created, and the book's resolution.14 climax occurs in "the burnt out husk" of Omaha. After the wagoners' battle, Val drives an old Knight's emphasis on frontier justice and his truck from Broken Bow to the "picturesque evocation of the Sandhills reinforce each other country north of Blair" and walks into Omaha, in this dynamic section. where he finds an unexpected ally in the shell The Western frame of the attack sequence, of a McDonald's within the occupied city. With in the physical context of the Sandhills as this support he takes the fight directly to the the wagon master organizes resistance, young Kurians in the old Strategic Air Command base men come of age, scouts report in, and there's at Bellevue where the twisted cross now flies, even a brink-of-doom romance for Val, is "its spiderish black and white design stark and recognizable to the point of nostalgia for forbidding against the blue of Omaha's skies.,,16 fans of classic frontier films such as those There is much enjoyment in watching the by John Ford, even with the irony of Val's book's bravura action take place in recogniz­ native ancestry. {Here the role of "savage" able Nebraska places, as well as in seeing the is displaced onto the aliens.} The episode is Trekkers merge the historical and futuristic built on the classic alternating attack and SandhilIs situation. Knight's palpable love of pursuit narrative Cawelti identified as a staple landscape revivifies the Great Plains situation of Western plots,15 as Val and his free-range to fresh effect, as well as the Western syntax partner fight hand to hand with the dreadful to which it pays homage. His post-holocaust "reapers," whose joints bend backward and atmosphere, deliberately reminiscent of the whose "tongue" can penetrate a skull. They Mad Max films and books such as I Am Legend are vulnerable only to beheading or otherwise and {which also has Nebraska severing the spinal cord, and here as in other scenes},11 evokes the isolation and monsters encounters with reapers, Val's more "savage" of horror in a seamless overlay with Westerns parang, a type of machete, is as valuable as a and the adaptable Plains situation. Many of the machine gun. same elements that color Nebraska's past and OPEN TO HORROR 127 present also operate here, especially passage 3. Stephen King, "Children of the Corn," in through wide-open space that both protects Night Shift (New York: Signet, 1976). and endangers. 4. Stephen King, The Shining (New York: Doubleday, 1977). Knight deals much less with towns in 5. Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, eds., Bare his series. Towns and cities are controlled Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King by the aliens and their collaborators, and so (New York: Warner, 1988), 138. Valentine's brief sojourns in them typically end 6. Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, Relic with violent escapes. Knight avoids town issues (New York: Tor, 1995); Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, Reliquary (New York: Tor 1997); Douglas in this novel by making the Trekkers nomadic Preston and Lincoln Child, Thunderhead (New and dodges the presence of cities by destroy­ York: Warner, 1999). ing them. It is the landscape and its action 7. Preston and Child may be referencing the possibilities that interest him in this series, Colorado Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, in which eight especially the mythic frontier of Westerns that members of the Cheyenne Council of Forty-Four were killed along with hundreds of others in a despicably frame heroic narrative so well. violent raid by drunken soldiers. The language of As both Still Life with Crows and Choice of "creek massacre" and "the forty-fives" is reminiscent, the Cat demonstrate, the Plains offer a natural but if so, the massacre is recast in time, outcome, and setting not only for realistic and historical most importantly in their novel, place. fiction but also for speculative horror and 8. Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, Still Life with Crows (New York: Warner, 2003), 162-63. contemporary stalker terror as well. It does Further citations to Still Life with Crows appear in so because of the ongoing dialogue between parentheses in the text. the Plains situation and familiar elements 9. Diane Dufva Quantic, "They Would See of horror, including agoraphobic as well as Nothing: The Deep Roots of Violence on the Great enclosed spaces, towns and even cities strug­ Plains" (Keynote talk presented at "Death, Murder, and Mayhem: Stories of Violence and Healing on gling to impose control on vast territory, and the Plains," the 34th Interdisciplinary Great Plains highway transportation systems attempting Studies Symposium sponsored by the Department to safely bridge vast geographic isolation in of English, University of Nebraska at Omaha, and which there may well be monsters and blood. the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Knight has matched his nomadic Sandhills Nebraska-Lincoln, Omaha, NE, April 16-19, 2008). 10. Douglas Preston, "Interview," November 25, ranchers to the still-resonating past of inde­ 2005, in "Authors on the Web," Bookreporter, http:// pendent yet vulnerable settlers to house the www.bookreporter.com/authors (accessed March freewheeling resistance fighters of a specula­ 30, 2008); Lincoln Child, "Interview," August 31, tive future. Preston and Child have utilized 2004, USA, http://www. the dialogue possible with the present and Hachettebookgroupusa.com/authors (accessed March 30,2008). past Plains for a narrative of healing neglected 11. Rob Bedford, "Interview with E. E. Knight," characters and a dying town as well as for May 3, 2005, SFFWorld, http://www.sffworld.com/ horror thrills. That these authors can do so interview/107pO.html (accessed March 30,2008). successfully underscores the resilient and 12. E. E. Knight, Choice of the Cat (New York: resonant situation of the Great Plains as it Roc, 2004), 187-88. 13. Bedford, "Interview with E. E. Knight," 3. continues in twenty-first-century fiction. 14. John G. Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique, 2nd ed. (Bowling Green, OH: Popular Press, 1984), 67. NOTES 15. Ibid., 94. 16. Knight, Choice of the Cat, 305. 1. Diane Dufva Quantic, The Nature of the 17. Richard Matheson, I Am Legend (New York: Place: A Study of Great Plains Fiction (Lincoln: Walker, 1954); Stephen King, The Stand (New University of Nebraska Press, 1995). York: Doubleday, 1990). The Stand utilizes corn­ 2. Douglas Preston, Guest writer presentation field scenes as horror sites in parallel to those in (Popular Culture Association/American Culture "Children of the Corn" and in Preston and Child's Association Conference, San Diego, CA, March novel, as well as making the savior of the new order 23-26, 2005). a little old black lady from Nebraska.