Introduction and Guide: They Fuck You Up

by L. Andrew Cooper and H.J. Dutton

and Silas the Scribble Man, Family Counselor

Now that everyone’s had a romantic Valentine’s Day, copulating their hearts out, perhaps even breeding–pardon, perhaps participating in the Miracle of Life, perhaps in an unintentional fashion–Horrific Scribes is here to help you think about the consequences of having offspring, which is, of course, fucking them up, and of being offspring, which is, of course, being fucked up.

We owe the pithy line “They fuck you up, your mum and dad” to poet Philip Larkin. It’s the opener of the short poem “This Be the Verse” (1971). It’s also what millions of people spend millions of dollars to figure out in therapy. We can’t quote the entire poem, which continues to be insightful, because it’s still under copyright, but you can read it here. To be the child of a parent is horrifying, and, incidentally, so is being the parent of a child. Horrific Scribes, Exhibit Five: They Fuck You Up is about generational trauma, which, as our Exhibit’s horrific attractions demonstrate, can run both ways.

Direct parental abuse of children–physical, mental, emotional–in horror works more or less like it does in other types of fiction, but instead of the trauma being, say, a psychological obstacle to be overcome, it’s more likely to be a pervasive force that twists every aspect of the narrative into grisly reminders, from environmental descriptions to the trajectory of the plot, in which trauma can transform into overwhelming human and/or supernatural menace. Take Stephen King’s 1974 debut novel Carrie. Margaret White, Carrie’s religiously overzealous, overbearing mother, is the story’s central antagonist. While the bullies Chris and Billy may serve as catalysts for Carrie’s final step over the edge on the fateful prom night, Margaret is the root of all the psychological conditions that lead to that final step. Everything unbearable in Carrie’s life–the self-loathing, the social isolation, the social ostracism–is a direct or indirect result of her mother’s physical, psychological, and emotional torture. Even though Margaret and even Carrie perceive the torture as love, the “love” destroys them both.

Wes Craven’s 1991 film The People Under the Stairs features victims of parental abuse whose story ends on a more positive note. The Robesons, almost a parody of a parental couple, have “adopted” (kidnapped) children who, despite suffering horrific abuses, ultimately escape their hellish domestic environment at the story’s climax via a violent uprising that culminates in the physical destruction of the abusive environment. Whereas Carrie’s retaliation against her environment culminates in her death, the Robeson children’s retaliation against their abusers ultimately grants them a second chance at life. Horror explores permutations of possible trajectories from the root traumas that fuck you up, and so do our Exhibit’s attractions. The boys in the opening story of our first gallery, “They Fuck You Up,” might escape their abusive conditions if they can “Burn the Witch.” In “The Inheritance,” trauma is already memory, taken to a literal level with a sci-fi conceit about implanted memories from parents, and it might be impossible to escape. The first story deals with mommy issues, the second with daddy issues, and the third–very strangely–goes back to mommy issues with mother-daughter rivalry. “A Witch’s Envy” otherwise has very little in common with the earlier story that its title echoes.

Again, part of the tragedy of Carrie is that Margaret loves her daughter and doesn’t intend the harm she so brutally inflicts. Our next gallery, “They Do Not Mean To (Sometimes),” pauses for a deeper dive into the tragedy of unintentional harm. “My Father, My Father” is a tale of father-son bonding gone wrong, of a father trying to pass on “traditional” masculine values that end up being damaging. The father means well in his attempt to pass on his values, but does meaning well clear him of wrongdoing? Carrie’s mother means well, but she’s a zealot, psychotic, a villain…. The horror of the unintentional tragedy in “Guilt” comes at least from the psychological and emotional impact on others of the emotions you can’t stop yourself from feeling. A parent loses one child, and another child survives, a child who seems, irrationally but irrevocably, to blame… the parent can’t help her feelings, which scar the surviving child forever. Is the parent guilty of abuse? The parent’s trauma traumatizes the child. Intentionally or not, the parent fucks the child up. The Robesons, who call themselves “Mommy” and “Daddy” while they abuse “their” children in direct and inhuman ways, are easy to hate and thus, in a way, comforting for horror audiences. The ambiguity of the unintentional traumatizers strikes closer to many people’s homes.

From well-meaning parents who unintentionally hurt their children we shift to well-meaning parents who don’t necessarily hurt their children but instead raise them to hurt others. Practically speaking, these parents do their jobs well. Better than well, sometimes. But from a moral standpoint, they are perhaps the worst of the bunch. These are the helicopter parents, the ones who love their children so much they cripple them. They’re the social darwinists who, while in the process of preparing their children to face the world, drain them of the empathy and compassion needed to function in society. They’re manufacturers of golden boys, bullies, future abusers. Jack Ketchum’s 1989 magnum opus The Girl Next Door is a particularly nasty example of such twisted nurturing. Though the despicable Ruth Chandler’s physical abuse is not limited solely to the girl of the title, Meg, she makes the girl her family’s primary scapegoat, a punching bag on which the household’s other children dump all their emotions. She may provide for her sons in a practical sense, but in doing so she erodes their innocence and leaves behind only monsters capable of torturing an innocent young girl.

Ketchum’s novel follows the same logic as the other works we’ve discussed. In Craven’s film, the children, or “people under the stairs,” become cannibalistic monsters due to the Robesons’ version of parenting, and in King’s novel, thanks to Margaret White, Carrie becomes a mass murderer at the prom. The third gallery in this Exhibit, “But They Do,” looks at very bad generational influences, monsters making monsters, that are more deliberate, more thought out, than what we see in Carrie, The People Under the Stairs, or even The Girl Next Door. But we’ve already said too much about what you’ll find when you read “Rite of Passage” and “Sharp Enough.”

We close the Exhibit with the idea that traumatized children might, in the right circumstances, turn around and traumatize their parents in response. Carrie’s story doesn’t end at the prom: it ends when she goes after her mother. Likewise, The People Under the Stairs ends after the children stage their uprising. Our last gallery, “(And Sometimes You Can Fuck Them, Too)” is a terrible addition to Larkin’s poem, but it’s a necessary addition that acknowledges kids grow up and gain the ability to cause trauma, to fuck up the ones who’ve fucked them. In “Mama Bear,” a dead son whose mother may have indulged his lethal habits in order to maintain their emotionally codependent relationship seems to find a devastating way to strike back. “QVC” presents another mother with a… problematic… son who fucks her up whether he means to or not. “Calluses” shows us a son who only wants to be like his father and earn his parents’ respect, but a parent’s good intentions aren’t the only ones that can go horrifically awry.

Seriously: can you be a parent or a child with fucking up others or being fucked up? We hope you didn’t come to an exhibit of dark fiction looking for bright answers. Truly, we don’t know. Someone somewhere might be well-adjusted. Do let us know if you find them.

FEATURES IN THE EXHIBIT

Gallery One: They Fuck You Up

“Burn the Witch” by Shawn Montgomery. We start in the perspective of one of two brothers, a perspective suitably fucked up by people and an environment rife with abuse and neglect: his mother and associates produce, deal, and use meth in and around their isolated home, and she’s so physically and emotionally violent that the boys believe she is a witch. The story’s genius is its balance of the boys’ perceptions, likely warped by innocence and terror, and clues about what’s really going on, but trauma has a way of changing the experience, if not the substance, of “reality.” When you’re a kid, a parent, especially an abusive mother, might seem powerful enough to be supernatural. And if she’s bad enough, she could really be a threat to your life. In a fucked up world, burning the witch–killing your mother–might be the only way to survive.

“The Inheritance” by Trisha Ridinger McKee. Many adults whose parents abused them as children prioritize an idealized image of their parents over the reality of who they were.Grown-up children clinging to such illusions strive to stay free from both the stigma and the trauma of abuse, but in the process they might blind themselves not only to the harm their caretakers have caused to them but to the damage they’ve caused others as well. In this Exhibit’s first very dark science fiction tale, a daughter inherits her late father’s memories and through them discovers that the man was far worse than an emotionally distant parental figure–and far worse than a “typical” physical or emotional abuser. Her traumatic memories from the past create a terrifying, incredibly fucked up present.

“A Witch’s Envy” by Matt Hollingsworth. “After all, daughters are made of their mothers. You but reclaim that which you gave her.” When the main character of “A Witch’s Envy”–we’re sure she’s a witch this time–learns of a spell that will preserve her youth, if only she chops off her daughter’s head, she pursues the idea. A mother envying her daughter, or any parents envying their children… we balk because we cherish ideals of parental selflessness, but how many parents try to recapture their youths through their kids? Moms grabbing the thrill of beauty pageants by making their daughters participate in them? Dads reliving glory days by pushing their sons to excel in sports? How many parents feel like they gave up their own youth when they had children, and now their kids owe them something? And how much do they fuck up their kids as a result? “A Witch’s Envy” is dark fantasy with strong fairy tale elements, and it’s way out there, but the relationship at its core raises very practical questions.

Gallery Two: They Do Not Mean To (Sometimes)

“My Father, My Father” by Zary Fekete. The second dark science fiction entry in this Exhibit features both a parent and a setting that, unlike the toxic people and places of “Burn the Witch” and “A Witch’s Envy,” maybe shouldn’t cause a child harm but unintentionally do. In a reenvisioning of Goethe’s poem “Erlkönig” (“The Erl-King”), “My Father, My Father” tells the story of a man who takes his son to a virtual reality simulation of a forest where they can face a series of basic survival challenges in a controlled and ultimately safe rite of passage. The father doesn’t have the control he thinks he does, however, and the challenges become deadly. Of course, the father doesn’t mean for the technology to malfunction, or for a ghost to get into the machine, but when things get fucked up, who else can you blame?

“Guilt” by Harley Carnell. Though many parent-child relationships become abusive early, often at the beginning, some dynamics start positive then sour, either over time or through an abrupt catalyst, often a tragedy, such as in this story. When a boy’s little brother vanishes during an indoor game of hide and seek, his mother is left with nobody to blame, nobody to vent her agonizing grief around–nobody except her other son. Witnessing his mother’s suffering, merely being in its presence, traumatizes the remaining boy. “Guilt” charts the lifetime-long aftermath of such trauma, the destruction wrought by uncontrollable, sometimes irrational emotions made all the more powerful by the absence of intention to harm.

Gallery Three: But They Do

“Rite of Passage” by Pamela Weis. Just as parents pass down their greatest attributes–empathy, compassion, humility, sacrifice–they also pass down their worst, traits such as aggression, dominance, ruthlessness, and, as in “Rite of Passage,” callous disregard for others’ well-being. A little girl, while playing with her friend, causes a tragedy. The girl becomes very worried about getting in trouble, but as the story evolves, the fact that she fears discipline at home, which might suggest an upbringing with reasonable values, becomes suspicious because the girl seems concerned about nothing but getting in trouble, which might suggest an upbringing that hasn’t taught her right from wrong. This little girl is pretty fucked up–but why?

“Sharp Enough” by Andrew Welsh-Huggins. Like “Burn the Witch” and “Rite of Passage,” this very short story is told from a child’s perspective, this time a teen’s, and the bulk of it deals with kids relating to each other, with the perspective character feeling socially ostracized in part because of her family’s “reputation.” The story seems to be about an outhouse that might be haunted, so all we’ll tell you is that it has something to do with monstrosity being handed from one generation to the next. We think you’ll agree that the picture of relationships is, by the end, appropriately fucked up.

Gallery Four: (And Sometimes You Can Fuck Them, Too)

“Mama Bear” by Joseph Hirsch. A parent choosing a “favorite” might appear to benefit the favored offspring, the golden child, and harm virtually everyone else caught in the family hierarchy beyond those who enable it. The reality of favoritism, however, is worse. Usually, everyone loses, and the “spares,” the kids lower on the ladder, are often the ones who survive family pressures the most intact. The following story is a particularly haunting portrayal of how a mother inadvertently destroys not only her favorite son by enabling his addiction to keep him close, but also herself. After her son’s death, she becomes attached to a teddy bear, and through either delusional or supernatural means, the son comes at his mother through the bear to fuck her up for the way she enabled his destruction.

“QVC” by SJ Townend. On the surface, “QVC” is about a woman who buys and becomes somewhat obsessed with a new air fryer, which she thinks will help her win greater social acceptance at the office. As the story continues, though, clues about why she’s so obsessed, why she feels such a need for social acceptance, why, in fact, she’s socially ostracized, begin to leak into her thoughts, thoughts about young children and thoughts about her adult son. Her son has done something so awful that he has fucked up both his own life and hers. What kind of person is she if she raised a boy so awful, so fucked up? After all, if a child is fucked up, the parents must be to blame. Whether she survives the destruction brought on her by her adult son, the destruction she might have sown as a parent, becomes a life-or-death confrontation with the air fryer. Moreover, the story is in second person: she is you, which gives her struggle with the cycle of trauma a more universal dimension.

“Calluses” by Tim Brown. A boy’s father is mostly absent, arguably neglectful, but the boy loves and admires him, wants to be like him, and his desire for emulation focuses on his father’s hands, rough and calloused from hard, manly work. Dad shows off by snuffing candles with his bare fingers, so the boy starts injuring himself to the pain of fire and other injuries. Self-harm escalates, driven by the desire to be like Daddy, and the boy’s parents don’t notice… more signs of neglect, a form of abuse… and the boy bides his time until he can demonstrate his accomplishments. In our Exhibit’s conclusion, everybody gets fucked up.