Introduction and Guide: Scary, Strange, and Totally Alien

by L. Andrew Cooper and H.J. Dutton

with Camille McCullough and Silas the Scribble Man, Body Inspector

Perhaps due to the nine movies and one season of television (so far) that have attracted huge audiences over the last six decades, the phenomenon brought to many people’s minds by the word “alien” is the “xenomorph” designed by H.R. Giger that first appeared in the appropriately named film Alien (1979) helmed by Ridley Scott. In the sense that “alien” means strange, the Alien creature is very alien both because it takes radically different forms and because of the radical differentness of the forms it takes: the crab- or spider-like facehugger that comes from an egg, an egg that doesn’t need fertilization because the facehugger implants a wormlike form in a host to gestate, after which it bursts out, killing the host, and grows into a much larger, insect-like creature with a large tentacular tail, inset jaws, a bulbous head, and other features that vary depending on its host’s morphology. In all forms, it has acid for blood, a real head-scratcher from a human perspective and one of its many inbuilt bioweapons. The xenomorph is consummately other.

And other, more precisely than strange, is what “alien” means, down to its Latin root. The conflict with the alien is fundamentally a conflict with otherness, which isn’t news to anyone who’s ever taken a class or read an essay about conflicts with monsters and such in literature and movies and elsewhere: they’re conflicts of the self, the “normal,” the safe, with the other, the outsider, the threat to the status quo. Such conflicts are necessary and inevitable: self and other define each other. By knowing the alien, we know ourselves. In Aliens (1986), one of the greatest cinematic heroes of all time, Ellen Ripley, observes, “I don’t know which species is worse. You don’t see them fucking each other for a goddamned percentage.” The aliens operate communally as a sort of hive and are very good at working together, and observing them reveals humans as creatures who are greedy and not only bad at working together but willing to work against each other even when doing so might result in mass destruction. The xenomorph of the franchise started by Alien kills people, threatening domination both through slaughter and through their parasitic transformation, and ultimately they threaten through comprehension–by having properties that seem incomprehensible and by making “us” comprehensible to ourselves in unwelcome ways. Alien horror is horror of the other AND horror of ourselves.

Welcome to Horrific Scribes, Exhibit Eight: Scary, Strange, and Totally Alien.

The triple threat of domination, transformation, and comprehension runs throughout the stories in this Exhibit, but we’ve divided them into three galleries in order to focus–artificially–on the threats in separate waves of space invaders.

We start with what people usually think of when they think of threats from the stars. Gallery One: Domination shows aliens taking over and controlling and/or destroying humanity. Emmie Christie’s “Echoes of an Endless Hour” deals with a type of domination that is itself quite alien: time has been colonized. Trapped in neverending slots for corporate participation, people occupy the same hour over and over again. As surreal as their situation is, its alienness does reveal uncomfortable truths about human “professionalism.” Blake’s “Weed Killer” might bring to mind Little Shop of Horrors (1960 or 1986, you choose), as the alien is a plant, but the way it dominates people’s behavior… perhaps by simply being… is very different… as is the cosmic climax. An alien influence creates a growing cult in Charman’s “Vote Abyss,” and this story makes the invasiveness of the domination, as well as its cosmic consequences, affect the self about as deeply as the other ever could.

The domination in Gallery One, even though it becomes very personal, maintains a separation between the human and the alien. In Gallery Two: Transformation, human and alien, self and other, merge, and the alien’s alteration of the human reveals aspects (both attractive and unattractive) of what the human is and what the human can be. To fall to the alien is already a frightening prospect. To become the alien is perhaps a more piquant flavor of horror. In Steven Mathes’s “Swimmer,” the alien is a somewhat traditional worm-like parasite that lives inside the human main characters, controlling their appetites… for normal food, but lots of it… and companionship with other carriers. The story’s humor masks insidiousness: how scary is a creature that transforms your appetites so that being under its control seems acceptable, possibly desirable? At what point do you lose yourself? Laura DeHaan’s main character faces a similar problem when, after years of colonial domination by humans, fungoid creatures begin counter-colonization that involves transforming human bodies at least partially into, well, fungus. Again, a playful tone doesn’t undo the underlying horror of a transformation that would obliterate a humanity that may deserve comeuppance for its colonialist ways. T. Fox Dunham’s “Survival Instincts” also looks at base human motivations and behaviors, but it leaves playfulness behind as a character sees an alien infestation transforming others and weighs the value of survival in any form, even at the cost of humanity.

The third and final group of attractions in this Exhibit, Gallery Three: Comprehension, addresses the most alienating impact of the encounter with the alien, destabilization of comprehension, a reliable foundation for seeing the world. Clendaniel’s “And Then There Were Ten Billion” riffs on the Alien xenomorph and takes the “alien” point of view, revealing a perspective that finds the human incomprehensible (alien) with consequences both horrific and hilarious. In Davis’s “It Hungers,” an alien creature, itself difficult or impossible to understand, makes two friends incomprehensible to each other and reveals appetites and brutality that might be alien, human, or both. We conclude with Eric Fomley’s “Traffic Stop,” in which a man tries to process an encounter with an alienness so extreme that human comprehension seems inadequate, perhaps broken.

The tour starts with mass domination and destruction and, despite some humor, generally gets bleaker from there. Enjoy the Exhibit!

THE ATTRACTIONS

We begin with a new feature: the story introductions below include comments about the tales’ inspirations that the authors have written especially for this Exhibit. Insightful! Compelling! Exclusive!

Gallery One: Domination

Emmie Christie, “Echoes of an Endless Hour”

“Have you ever had the feeling that a certain hour in your day seems to take up the rest of it? Well, your company might have been . . . Merged, and your time along with it.” —Emmie Christie

More surrealist than science fiction, the characters in “Echoes of an Endless Hour” are, in a sense, clock people. Their faces are clock faces that indicate which hour of the day they inhabit as each person in the corporate universe spends virtually all time within one repeating hour. The humans, then, are partly alien as a result of the… beings… that have dominated them and their time (transformed, next gallery stuff), but more important in this context, they are regulated, dominated in a way totally other, totally different from ways humans dominate humans. Except, as Christie asks, have you ever had one hour dominate others? Maybe “alien” time in this story tells us more about how we really relate to time, especially when work is concerned, than we’d be able to see without help from domination by an other perspective.

Amanda M. Blake, “Weed Killer”

“I wrote ‘Weed Killer’ inspired by the brave little weeds that could sprout in the cracks and contraction joints rather than rooting in soil or somewhere a little more nurturing. Dandelions have always been my favorite, at every stage of their development. That fondness for unconventional survivors mixed with a fascination and fear of nature striking back, especially plant life, which seems stranger and stranger the more you learn about it. There’s a whole other world within our world that we treat like scenery, and it can be just as dangerous as being stalked by a tiger. That, and I really wanted donuts.”—Amanda M. Blake

The fascination that Blake mentions in some ways motivates the story, which focuses at least as much on people’s reactions to and speculation about the strange plants mentioned in the title as on the plants themselves. The plants’ stardom plays costar to the plants, and gentle satire helps make what Blake’s unconventional survivors ultimately reveal more fun.

Barry Charman, “Vote Abyss”

“Some stories arrive with a question you don’t know how to answer. What would you do if the world simply changed one day? Abruptly and forever. What if you were too afraid to look up, because you knew something would be looking back…? This was a story that arrived with a built in mystery and a tension I wanted to keep coiled until the very last line… “ —Barry Charman

The standard story of alien conquest entails either swift and brutal decimation or covert colonization, but Charman’s take on domination by cosmic force does neither. Instead, he poses a much more frightening question: What if they win because we don’t care enough? What if we’re all-too-eager to be complicit in our own subjugation?

Gallery Two: Transformation

Steven Mathes, “Swimmer”

“At same the time when my father was diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer’s, my brother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Life went on. Their debilitation and approaching death became normal. At that time, the normalization of horror became one of my (many) obsessions. The mind swimmers in my story affect the digestive system and maim the minds of their victims, and the true horror for me is the way everyone accepts them. One role for the horror genre, I have decided, is to inspire us all to fight back against the monsters around us with renewed outrage.” —Steven Mathes

The parasite, by definition, harms its host (parasitism is the bad form of symbiosis). Even a parasite’s proximity could threaten sickness or loss of control. But while the nasties in Mathes’s story inflict both, they also do something arguably worse: they make their hosts enjoy it. “Swimmer” has a deceptively lighthearted surface, but as Mathes indicates, the lack of horror surrounding the story’s aliens is a deeper horror.

Laura DeHaan, “It Gets Worse If You Pick At It”

“I love the movie The Last Days on Mars, and I knew how I wanted my story to end, but getting there felt so dreary and overplayed. Of course the characters break quarantine! How else would you get fungus aliens! So I decided the hell with it and skipped straight to the Oh No, The Consequences part of My Actions. It’s very much a B movie story, with some deeply silly nods to other alien horror movies (fun fact: every character’s name is taken from the cast and crew of the musical version of Little Shop of Horrors) and also deeply anti-colonial (a horror story with social commentary! The nerve!).” —Laura DeHaan

A lot of manuscripts submitted for publication include some form of the word “end” at the story’s end as a formatting convention; it’s not intended for publication. However, DeHaan’s story plays so well as the ending of a B movie, we weren’t sure whether the “End” in the manuscript might be part of the movie-ness, so initially, we published it. DeHaan clarified that it wasn’t part of the story, so it’s gone now, but our confusion reflects just how blurry lines get as the story delivers only the climax of an alien encounter that transforms humans who have behaved badly.

T. Fox Dunham, “Survival Instinct”

“I done bad shit. . .

But he did deserve it.

What would I do if given a death sentence but told I could live but live compromised? Survival is our strongest instinct, well perhaps second strongest. I’m still not sure, which is why I keep writing. With little chance of survival, I accepted death when I was 18, and it was only a quirk of faith as to why I survived; of course, at the time, I wasn’t given a choice.

Matteo is a young thug, a street enforcer in a Pennsylvania crime family who is used to fighting external battles on the streets, but then he’s forced to fight an internal battle when he’s diagnosed with cancer.

Fear isn’t so hard to live with when you can fight it, see it, size it up. He’s wily enough to survive on the street, to fight in a war where poverty has whacked the social compact. Worse, the families are making book on a new street drug, Sug’ or Sugar while junkies are vanishing from the city.

People think they understand that they’re going to die. Informed by movies, which create a comfortable version of death, people think they’ll know how they’ll respond to a death sentence. I can assure you that unless you’ve been through it, you have no idea.

This is the concept that drove ‘Survival Instinct.’ Matteo believes himself a brave soldier, a man who faces death every day on the street, so, he believes himself well-prepared when death comes for him not from behind or in front—from within.

He’s not.

People can be quite dismissive of me; in fact, I’ve learned not to talk about my fight with cancer. The few friends who serve as father-confessor for me, I’ve had to teach how to talk to me because outside my frame of reference, all they know is how television has dramatized cancer:  complete shit designed to uplift people and imbue them with a spurious sense of control.

The reality terrifies and depresses.

Matteo feels himself slipping away, but he’s determined to be brave. He’s determined to live by the warrior’s code and if he must, surrender one of the few things of any real meaning in this world: his life. But he finds that emulating television heroes and actually accepting his fate are vastly different.

So, when given a choice to compromise and survive or die uncompromised, Matteo makes a very human choice, one that sooner or later, most of us are challenged with.

Cancer has defined my life. I didn’t want it to, but much like cancer has taught me, control is an illusion, and people become desperate to regain that feeling of control, even if it’s an illusion. Most everything in this life is an illusion, and once you accept that, once you acknowledge that you only ever had the ability to influence but not control, you are free. Scared shitless. But free.

Oddly enough, I have a story related to this story. Right now, I have a pathology report open on my phone. Last week, I had two biopsies done (three this year so far) during an endoscopy. I have two major danger areas in my GI tract, and I’ve been told that there’s a 60 percent chance that I’m going to develop a malignancy in these spots; so, I need to be scoped every two years.

What was perfunctory turned into worrying when I learned of the biopsies as I came out of the anesthetic.

I still haven’t looked at it. Do I really want to know?

And would I make Matteo’s choice if given the option? Would you? Ask me again if the scenario ever plays out, because until it does, you may not be the person you thought you were.” —T. Fox Dunham

Gallery Three: Comprehension

Jon Clendaniel, “And Then There Were Ten Billion”

“I came up with the idea for this story, oddly enough, during a late-night viewing of Creature from the Black Lagoon. As I watched the Gill-man ambling around with his outstretched arms and goofy facial expression, I had a thought: What if he just wants to give everyone hugs, but he doesn’t know his own strength? I took that concept and ran with it. Somewhere along the way, it turned into a sendup of Alien and the sci-fi/horror tropes that movie helped spawn (pun intended). Reading this story never fails to put a smile on my face, and I hope it does the same for you.” —Jon Clendaniel

This story is one of the few pieces in the Horrific Scribes archive that definitely needs classification as horror comedy—because it is indeed about an Alien-style alien who really only wants to hug everybody on a ship, people insufficiently aware they’re living horror stereotypes—but what might be its greatest strength is that it’s still quite horrifying. Alien hugs are funny to think about, but the idea of misunderstanding murder as affection is legitimately scary.

John Davis, “It Hungers”

“This story was inspired in large part by the 1981 Andrzej Zulawski film Possession, in which a woman’s suspected infidelity becomes something much more bizarre and sinister–and borderline extra-terrestrial. I took the basic premise of the film, replaced the characters with two teenage friends, and moved it from the grimy streets of West Berlin to the rolling paddocks and dirt roads of regional Australia. From there, this story of obsession, manipulation, and eroticism naturally flowed.” —John Davis

We’re never quite sure what it is. It might not be from outer space or an other realm like the rest of the “aliens” in this Exhibit. But it’s strange and mysterious to the two boys who discover it, and in a manner that draws on more intimate psychology than “Weed Killer,” this story chronicles the fascination that develops from the alienness of it. The boys’ teenage emotions and appetites get mixed up with whatever it wants, and the boys don’t comprehend it… or each other… or themselves… or what they’ll do.

Eric Fomley, “Traffic Stop”

“’Traffic Stop’ comes from my interest in two things. I love stories that start out normal before taking a sharp left turn into the weird. I also love contemplating what happens in dark and abandoned places, like alleys, abandoned factories, and subway tunnels. It’s fun to think about what otherworldly encounters happen here.” —Eric Fomley

Most characters in cosmic horror make the mistake of actively seeking out the eldritch and incomprehensible. Though often unaware of the full extent of the danger ahead, these characters glance into the void by choice. Fomley flips this trope on its head by taking us away from primordial tombs and gloomy libraries of classic weird fiction and into a scenario that is, at least at first, strikingly mundane. He achieves a scope that is, however, appropriately unspeakable.

EXHIBIT EIGHT: Return to the Order of Attractions

Begin Gallery One: Domination with “Echoes of an Endless Hour“