Guest Post: Influences on Shelter for the Damned: Novels About Obsession by Mike Thorn
Novels About Obsession
Publisher: JournalStone
Publish Date: February 26, 2021
Paperback
190 Pages
Standalone
Genre: Horror
Influences on Shelter for the Damned: Novels About
Obsession
Obsession is a primary driving
force in Shelter for the Damned, as the novel’s protagonist, Mark, becomes
intensely fixated on a shack he discovers in a suburban field. As the Shack
begins revealing its weird sentience, Mark’s interest grows. His relationship
to the Shack eventually becomes horrifically parasitic, evoking the nature of
debilitating addiction.
While writing Shelter for
the Damned, I was conscious of several other books focused on obsession and
dependency. I was especially interested in novels that used first-person or
quasi-omniscient style to depict their protagonists’ experiences. I have
provided snapshots for some of the most overt influences on Shelter for the
Damned below…
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, by Herman Melville (1851)
This cosmically ambitious
novel seems to defy all rules of literary tradition. It reads somehow like
pre-modern postmodernism, incorporating nonfiction tangents, verse, and a vast
array of mythological, literary and religious allusions into its narrative. It
might be the most essential American novel about the forceful power of
obsession (which M elville describes throughout as “monomania”). Indeed, thanks
to Melville, the term “white whale” is now a colloquial stand-in for the
out-of-reach object of one’s obsession. I have always loved the way this novel
evokes the titular mystic creature through its form. I tried to echo a little of
that in my own humble, mere-mortal way. Earlier drafts of Shelter for the
Damned included some iffy concrete poetry, in which I built the Shack’s
shape through punctuation marks. Ultimately, I abandoned my wilder experimental
ideas in favor of a leaner, more visceral plot.
The Killer Inside Me,
by Jim Thompson (1952)
I was reading a lot of Jim Thompson while
writing the first draft of Shelter for the Damned. I was intoxicated by
Thompson’s clean, brutal prose style, and his penchant for folding
experimentation and philosophy into works of genre fiction. Like the
protagonists in many of Thompson’s novels, the central character in The
Killer Inside Me is a violent, sociopathic individual. I was stunned by the
way Thompson’s novel so convincingly conveyed this terrifying man’s
perspective, offering an intimate look at the depravity underlying his polite façade.
I was so taken with Thompson’s work that he became the namesake for one of the
police officers in my novel.
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion,
by Yukio Mishima (1956)
I was about midway through my first draft
of Shelter for the Damned when my friend Tomas Boudreau recommended The
Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Tomas had read some early chapters of my
book, and he thought Mishima’s novel might be a useful point of reference. He
was right. At the center of Temple is a young man named Mizoguchi, an
outsider much like Mark in Shelter for the Damned. Mishima’s novel sees Mizoguchi
becoming mesmerized by Kyoto’s famous Golden Temple, absolutely transfixed by
its sublime beauty. However, as the novel progresses, Mizoguchi’s vision of the
Temple becomes tainted, and he ultimately decides to commit a profane act of
destruction.
The Room,
by Hubert Selby Jr. (1971)
Published seven years after Hubert Selby
Jr.’s devastating debut (Last Exit to Brooklyn [1964]), The Room is
the most sustained and disturbing demonstration of first-person monologue I
have ever read. Written in Selby’s trademark Joycean, rhythmic prose style, The
Room is a horror novel whose movement is all interior, tracing the
protagonist’s descent into the depths of his own sadistic revenge fantasies. I
cannot think of a more demanding study of the human psyche at its most violent
and corrosive. When I first discovered Selby’s work in my teens, it felt like a
truly game-changing event. The encounter got me thinking, Wait … fiction can
do this? Fiction can go there? Selby is, by far, one of my biggest
and longest lasting creative influences. Also, like Thompson, he is the
namesake for one of the police officers in Shelter for the Damned.
Christine,
by Stephen King (1983)
Like Shelter for the Damned,
Stephen King’s Christine locates its horror in the experiences of young,
suburban males. King’s novel has a lot to say about the masculinist psychology
underlying American consumerism, which the author explores through the
fetishization of the title car, a 1958 Plymouth Fury. Like the Shack in my
novel, Christine’s car is the protagonist’s supernatural object of
obsession, and its powerfully seductive force leads to violent consequences. In
formal terms, this is quite an adventurous novel: the bookends are narrated in
first-person by protagonist Dennis, but the body of the novel swerves into
third-person quasi-omniscient style for narrative and thematic purposes. Like
any dutiful student of the genre, I have read a lot of Stephen King, and I have
tried to learn from all of it. In terms of thematic dealings with obsession,
though, Christine had the biggest impact on Shelter for the Damned.
The Cipher,
by Kathe Koja (1991)
Kathe Koja’s classic debut novel The
Cipher finds cosmic horror within banal spaces. Specifically, the locus of
terror is a dark hole that materializes in the storage room of the apartment
building inhabited by the protagonist, Nicholas. Devilishly nicknamed “the
Funhole,” this mysterious void draws Nicholas away from the doldrums of his life
as a jaded video store clerk, leading him and his girlfriend, Nakota, down a
hallucinatory and destructive path. Koja’s voice is haunting, gorgeous, and
undeniably distinct; in her first novel, she already displays a fully formed
sense of character interiority, imagery, and atmosphere the likes of which most
mature writers never quite achieve. She is one of the genre’s greatest writers
of obsession, understanding monomania always as something equally alluring and
harmful.
Zombie,
by Joyce Carol Oates (1995)
Modeled quite explicitly after real-life American
serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, Joyce Carol Oates’s scarring novel Zombie occupies
the headspace of Quentin P, who becomes possessed by the idea of turning some
unsuspecting young man into his brainless sex slave. In search of the ideal
“zombie,” Quentin abducts, tortures, and murders numerous victims. Oates locks
the reader into Quentin’s point-of-view, transcribing his consciousness through
stunted, almost childlike sentence structure. This book is slim but ferocious,
immersing itself in the horribly deluded pathology of its protagonist without
ever turning away.
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