"The supernatural". That's a rather vague term, isn't it? What is 'the supernatural', exactly? H. P. Lovecraft once said, "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is the fear of the unknown." That's what the term means to me at least, the unknown, the unexplainable which lies beyond the reach of man's knowledge, no matter how advanced.
Human literature throughout the ages has been filled with tales of terror and death that can leave you pulling the covers of your bed over your face to hide from the dark and what may dwell in it. In our world today where so many things are quantifiable or easily explained away by some kind of speculative theory, is not Lovecraft's statement more true?
The world of the supernatural knows no bounds. Yes, it rose up out of what mankind could not understand, but it can be born solely from our thoughts as well from that creepy old church down the street; from an anomalous blip on a radar screen, to that spot in the neighbor's cornfield where year after year nothing grows. To prove my point that a supernatural story can be contrived from anything, let's look at three examples.
That old church down the street, now abandoned and left in a state of disrepair-- why? Churches are built on holy ground, or ground sanctified by God. Well, perhaps the land this church was built on was sanctified by something else before man and our young religions ever set foot upon it. The taint of the things before resided too strongly to be driven away, and over the years the churchgoers themselves became touched by it. In their prayers to God the taint answered and bought corruption and evil to the town, until finally outsiders killed the town's population, but even that is long forgotten in the depths of time and now a town has been reborn around the building and the church is about to be reopened by a new bishop. Or perhaps the evil has festered and given birth to a corporal being that lurks in the rafters, awaiting any who visit the ruins of the church. Supernatural tales are often full of atmosphere and implication, and a premise like this lends itself well to those devices.
Now my example of a radar screen fits perfectly into something such as Lovecraft himself might have written about. Suspend your disbelief and imagine a small, rural airport where a man has worked his whole life. Every month, at a certain point in the cycle of the moon, something goes haywire with the machine and a blip pops up that is not a plane. Is it a monster from the caves of the surrounding mountains coming out to feed, a ghost plane always trying to find a way to land but never can, or something far worse? In any case, our protagonist has to know and so again we have a story leading to fear, death, or madness yet with technology thrown in to prove the insignificance of man.
And finally, the cornfield. No, I am not going back to unholy ground or Stephen King's "He who walks behind the rows", but imagine this:a being who has lived since the dawn of time and once walked the Earth, giving birth to all our tales of vampires, and yet is nothing like them. This being lies dormant, waiting to be awakened, but even in so doing feeds in an intravenous fashion on all forms life above his tomb as he waits to be freed by an unsuspecting farmer or work crew who one year willdig too deep. He drains the farmer's life force, leaving only a skeleton in rags, and sets out to rediscover the world of man and all its new wonders.
The supernatural is indeed boundless in terms of story ideas and its uses: from the possessed child placed in a special ed. class room, to snowstorms in the desert, to the packs of werewolves who stalk Central Park. Let your nightmares run free and endless worlds and stories will unfold before you as you write. Poe himself once used a simple raven to invoke other-worldly fear, what will you use?
Eric S. Brown is the author of the paperback collections Dying Days, Space Stations and Graveyards, and Portals of Terror, and the chapbooks Flashes of Death, Zombies the War Stories, Bad Mojo, Still Dead, Blood Rain and Dark Karma, as well as the e-books Blood Rain (extended), Quantum Nightmares, due out soon from 31 Eyes Publishing, and Poisoned Graves. His short fiction has been published well over two hundred and fifty times in a wide array of markets like The Book of Dark Wisdom, Nocturnal Ooze and Alien Skin magazines, The Edge, Story House Coffee, Post Mortem, and Seasons of the Night among many, many others. He is 29 years old and lives in NC with his wife Shanna. His first novel, Cobble (co-authored by Susanne Brydenbaugh), is due out in early 2005 from Cyberpulp Books. If you are interested in checking out more of his work visit his web site.
