Under Cover by Elizabeth Bonecher-Brenaman
Ξ November 19th, 2008 | → | ∇ Horror Fiction - Journey into the Dark & Foreboding, The World of Fiction, Thunk |
Under Cover
by Elizabeth Bonecher-Brenaman
I still remember the first time I scared the living daylights out of myself with a book. My age, eleven. The book, The Exorcist. The circumstances, under the covers after dark on a school night.
My parents, a product of the 70’s love scene, were, at the time, liberals. They didn’t believe in war, they didn’t believe in Johnson, and they certainly didn’t believe in censorship, not even for their eleven-year-old’s reading materials. So, they allowed me to read The Exorcist; they just didn’t allow me to read it, or anything else, after 9 p.m. on a school night. The whole “freedom” thing didn’t extend to me. Hence, the need to hide under the covers with William Peter Blatty’s masterpiece of terror and a flashlight.
Things in that book shocked even me, the daughter of liberal, free-love hippies. My heart slammed against my chest, my breath strained to break free of its confinement (but I knew if I breathed, I’d scream, so I held it as much as I could), my Catholic-In-Training (Grandma’s insistence and stewardship, not the free lovers’) Ego stunned to the very core.
The first night, I was fine. The second night, however, I managed to get to the middle of the book (a fast reader, even then). I quit reading at 1 a.m., and didn’t sleep the rest of the night.
I lay staring at the ceiling, my heart pounding, my sheets soaked in sweat, my breathing shallow and rapid. What was that sound? My head whipped to the side. I pulled the covers up to my eyeballs, curled my knees to my chest to keep my feet under the blanket. As we all know, the blanket is a force field impermeable to ghouls, vampires, and zombies alike.
But what about demons?
This was a new one for me. After years of Creature Feature I’d built up an arsenal of protections and safeguards against ghouls, but what about demons? What about Satan?
As I said, I didn’t sleep at all that night. Over and over again, at school the next day, my head slumped off my palm and cracked my desk, much to the delight of my classmates. When the final bell rang, I opened my eyes to a puddle of drool. My teacher, Mr. Czeplewski, called me to the front as everyone filed out and asked me if everything was okay?
Was it? Was it?
No.
I was, fundamentally, changed. Things would never be the same again.
After Creature Feature, I’d go to bed and go through the motions of tucking body parts in the blanket force field, but deep down inside, I knew there was no such thing as vampires. No such thing as zombies. No such thing as swamp monsters.
But demons?
All around me, unseen forces lurked. Forces that practiced evil for the sake of evil. And, the former Catholic in me believed it.
I spent the rest of my reading years trying to replicate that high, that terror. That belief. I never quite could. I came close with some Stephen Kings, some Peter Straubs, some Clive Barkers, but never quite got there.
I’ve never forgotten that lesson as a reader or as a writer.
Make it believable, and you’ve got your reader by the balls.
One Response to ' Under Cover by Elizabeth Bonecher-Brenaman '
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on November 20th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
Metaphorical balls, I assume.
I didn’t read horror as a kid, but that’s because a couple of movies freaked me out. One of them, I didn’t even see: Hitchcock’s Psycho (Robert Bloch book). My parents went to see it and when they came home, they told me about it. Neither one is a great storyteller, but the idea of lunatic murderers was worse than any paranormal horror that might happen along. Demons within are the kind that scare the crap out of me.
Oh, and Creature From the Black Lagoon had me running out of the theatre. Why would I be in a movie house watching this when I was only 7-years-old?
Anyway, human evil and radiation-mutated creatures are my horror places.