FEAR AND ATTRACTION

by Gina Sestak

The topic of the month is scary things, so I sat down and tried to think about some things that frighten me.  I had to stop.  I got too scared . . .

It's odd, though, that things that terrified people for centuries seem to have morphed into things that are downright attractive.  Take the vampire, for example.

Many cultures have legends about beings - the dead or undead, corporeal or in spirit form - who suck blood from the living.  Sounds pretty horrible, doesn't it?  Early depictions of the vampire on film showed a repulsive creature, one you wouldn't want to run across in a dark alley - or anywhere else!

Bela Lugosi may have been a leading man on stage in his native Hungary, but when he played Dracula in American horror films, he managed to look pretty scary.

I know I'd run screaming if I saw him coming after me.

Anne Rice's vampires are attractive, but they are killers nonetheless.  Even Louis, with all his angst, slaughters humans.

Nowadays,  though, vampires are depicted as attractive, even relatively harmless.  Think Edward Cullen from the Twilight films.

Who wouldn't want him sneaking in through her bedroom window?

[Yeah, I know he's way too young for me, but this is fantasy, OK?]

The werewolf has undergone a similar metamorphosis.

When Lon Chaney transformed beneath the full moon, we knew we'd better run and hide or else he'd tear us
limb from limb.  He couldn't help himself.

Neither could Professor Remus Lupin, the werewolf in the Harry Potter films.  He, too, is a tragic figure, doomed to turn into a monster every month.

Even a man who is pure of heart
And says his prayers by night
May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms
And the moon is shining bright.


Jacob Black, on the other hand, is a hunk, no question.  Even in wolf form he comes across as a nice guy in the Twilight films - at least, if you are Bella Swan and not a vampire.


[Yes, I have read Breaking Dawn, but let's not go there.   That book creeped me out in ways that are neither fun nor even horror.  I mean, the Jacob part was just plain icky.]

So, what do you think?  Do vampires and werewolves scare you?  Or would you rather date a few?

WRITERS AND OTHER PEOPLE

by Gina Sestak

[Another digression from my posts about prior jobs.]

There is a fundamental difference between writers and other people, I've been told. That difference is that writers write. By "write," I don't just mean the act of putting pen to paper or fingertip to key. I mean the magical alchemy by which we transmute human experience and ideas into words.

For me, this usually involves translating whatever I'm experiencing into nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives while it's still in progress. No matter what is happening around me, be it flower petals wafting on a zephyr or a distracted driver trying to merge into my car, somewhere in the back of my mind I'm crafting sentences to describe what's going on.

This isn't always a good thing. When I stood beside my aunt's deathbed putting words to family tragedy I felt like a ghoul. But those sentences formed the core of my essay "Breathe Out" that won second place for non-fiction in Pennwriters' 2004 contest.

I was thinking about this last week when I had the flu. You have to understand, I had it bad. Vomiting, diarrhea, chills. Three days without eating. Too little energy to feed the cats. [Don't worry. They had dry food available.] Part of me was thinking, "Am I going to die?" while another part, the writer part, was putting the sensations into words.

I'm not going to record that graphic description of my symptoms here, but I suspect I'll use it somewhere. I've often wondered whether Anne Rice was sick while she was writing "The Tale of the Body Thief." [!!SPOILER ALERT!!] In that book, Anne Rice's protagonist Lestat (a vampire) is tricked into trading bodies temporarily with a human, only to discover that the human body is infected with a disease meant to kill it, thereby allowing the human trader to retain Lestat's vampire body. Anne Rice gives us detailed descriptions of being ill from the perspective of someone who hasn't had so much as a cold in centuries. Another part of the same book made me wonder whether or not Anne Rice had recently acquired a dog.

Does everybody else do this, too? Do you find yourself in traffic, in nature, or in bed(!) putting everything you experience into words? Please let me know.