The Articles of Dume

Foreword

by H. K. Hillman.

Okay. Cards on the table, head on the block, delicate parts in the vice, here it is. Doctor Phineas Dume is my most deranged alter-ego to date. A casual psychopath who lives in a crumbling castle with his bizarre wife, demented child, currently alien assistant and the ghost of his father.

He treats conversations with Death and the Devil as routine and, in between dodging the patricidal tendencies of his offspring, performs odd experiments and prepares interesting meals based on whoever has come calling that day.

The nearby village occasionally has parades in his honour, usually involving pitchforks and flaming brands, but they never reach the castle because its inhabitants—particularly the Scaly Swamp Thing and the Ferals—tend to disrupt the villagers’ approach by eating some of them. They are lucky. Only one person so far has routinely visited the castle and returned home afterwards, and you’ll meet him more than once in this collection.

The character of Dume is a fiction. A creation, partly of mine, but initiated by the editor of AlienSkin magazine who gave him his name and his first break as a writer in 2003. The maniac has been unstoppable since.

Even the closure of AlienSkin in 2010 didn’t help. His blog, still (at this time) hosted on AlienSkin, he simply moved to Blogspot and now he’s moving it to WordPress.

Over the years he has begun to seem real but I promise, he is a fiction. The terrible things he claims to have done among these pages, he has not really done. Well, not while I was watching, anyway.

The reader need not fear the unbidden visit from Dume and his family and can visit the swamps without watching out for him and his entourage of distorted and reconstructed creatures.

That’s me in the clear then. I’ve put in a disclaimer so if you meet this nut, that’s your problem. There is a silver lining in that it’s not likely to be a problem for very long unless you’re resilient enough to last longer than most of his visitors. It’s best not to be, honestly.

One thing a writer has to be careful of, I’m told, is that their characters don’t turn out to be just a reflection of themselves.

Personally I’m more concerned about the opposite happening.

Now I hand you over into the less than gentle hands of Phineas Dume. I’ll see you on the other side—of the book, I mean.

Well... probably.

H. K. Hillman

Contents

Introduction

by Phineas Dume.

I was honoured when my first article was accepted for AlienSkin’s November 2003 edition, and astonished to be repeatedly asked for an article for every issue thereafter until the magazine’s unfortunate closure in July 2010.

Since that time I have repeatedly looked over those articles and wondered if anyone might ever want to read them again. Finally, and long after the Alienskin Queen Mother had given up suggesting that I do it, I have compiled the articles into one handy book.

There were forty-six of them but one has been lost to the vagaries of my computer filing methods. If that one should come to light in the future, I will make it a free eBook just to make the collection complete.

Interspersed with actual writing-related articles are some designed more to inspire than to instruct, and a few that relate conversations and interactions with various members of, and visitors to, the House of Dume. All were written with one goal in mind: to get the reader inspired to write their own tales, to delve into the shadows of their minds and haul out the writhing horrors that lurk in the darkness.

Rather than simply listing the articles in chronological order, I have chosen to group related themes together. The date of publication in Alienskin is included with the title of each article, for reference, because a few components of some of the articles follow a time-related thread.

Selecting the groups was no easy task because several articles include multiple themes and many of them cross boundaries. Sometimes they don’t just cross those boundaries, sometimes they shatter the boundaries into little pieces.

Teachers of the art of writing have a tendency to set limits on their students’ work, to make it fit a library classification of genre so they will know which shelf to place it on when it is done.

The Dume writing method, as with all Dume methods, has no boundaries as you will see. Set your horror in space or in an alternate reality. Describe it happening in the present, the distant past or the far future. Put your gibbering homunculus between lovers on a park bench. Make it sound as if it’s going to be one of those works classed as ‘literary’ and then drop in a pair of peeled eyes in a jar.

Those who prefer to work within the artificial walls of genre classification might feel a little discomfort at some of the articles here but then, that’s what horror writers do. It is our intention to cause discomfort, fear, even terror and I see no reason why that should be restricted to the stories themselves.

Do not expect a ‘how-to’ set of simple instructions within these pages. That is the stuff of colleges and courses. This is not a manual. This is a book of ideas.

I hope that, within these pages, you will find something to inspire you to write tales of your own and if not, I hope to at least provide some entertainment on the way.

Dr. Phineas Dume.

Contents

Humanity, a shadow in darkness.

Of all the horrors man can devise, there is none to match Man himself. It stands to reason, if you give it a little thought. What creation has ever managed to best its creator?

All those stories that terrified you, all those whispered tales that had you cowering under blankets or drawing in close to the campfire, were and are the creations of humanity.

In some cultures you hear tales of Hell, of eternal torment visited upon the unfaithful, but look around at the world you live in. People tear each other apart, and I don’t mean that metaphorically. They cut off heads, burn each other alive, they use bombs and bacteria and even light and sound to kill each other and they do it every day.

Read the tortures of the Inquisition, the war crimes of a thousand different armies throughout history, the actions of the twisted killers, and realise that this is humanity. This is the horror.

Hell? How can Hell compete with the things we do to each other?

This section contains those articles that deal primarily with Man as the monster. With careful writing, you might find you rarely need to look any further.

Contents

The Marvellous Madness of the Mad Scientist.

November 2003

There is one wonderful advantage to the mad scientist character. Motivation. That is, you don’t need any. Any scientist, mad or otherwise, comes with a built-in motivation. What happens if…

What happens if I build something that melts the polar icecaps? What happens if I stitch together body parts and blast electricity through them? What happens if I drill right through to the centre of the Earth? What happens if I take Einstein’s equations and use them to build a bomb?

What happens if I press this button?

That’s really all you need. Still, there are alternatives. You could have your scientist motivated by unrequited love. The best example I’ve ever seen of this was in the Boris Karloff movie ‘The Man Who Changed His Mind’, where Karloff, the scientist, tries to transfer his mind into the body of his young assistant’s boyfriend. Mary Shelley uses almost the opposite approach in ‘Frankenstein’, where Victor largely ignores his fiancée in order to spend more time on his grisly research. As soon as you label a character as a mad scientist, your problem of motivation is solved.

And, of course, the things you can do with your mad scientist are limitless. Travel in time, invent a new disease, visit alternative dimensions, discover and/or create monsters of any description, tamper with the very fabrics of life, time or space and unleash mighty forces your poor scientist will not be able to control. Surely there can be no disadvantages to such a wonderfully versatile character?

Unfortunately, yes. The first problem is that of the good old cardboard character. Devising a mad scientist who isn’t just like all the other mad scientists is no easy task. The off-the-shelf solution is just too tempting. An unkempt, shifty-eyed white-coated scientist devises or discovers a monster. Almost as soon as the story opens you just know he’s going to lose control of that monster at some point. Try making the scientist less obviously mad.

Here’s an idea. I can’t actually think of a female mad scientist in any story. Faced with two scientists, a man and a woman, which of them would you immediately assume to be the unhinged genius? There are many women in science now, so it’s time to stop ignoring the deranged female professors out there.

Here’s another one—make the scientist sane, and give him a mad, manipulative assistant. The best madness is always the hidden madness; the real lunatic is best played in the shadows.

The second problem is in the science. Do you know any? I remember watching a film which was set on Mars. One of the scientists was a biologist, who listed the DNA code as A, C, G and M. That one line ruined the film for me. M should have been T. One letter wrong in a 90-minute film, and the whole illusion of the story just fell apart. I won’t tell you the name of the film because I don’t want to spoil it for the non-scientists out there.

So, if your scientist is a biologist, physicist, chemist, whatever - make sure you get the facts right. Don’t refer to Salmonella as a virus. It’s a bacterium. Don’t try to react argon with neon. It won’t happen. Someone out there will spot your mistake, you can be sure of that.

You don’t need a degree in the appropriate scientific discipline to be convincing. A few copies of a scientific magazine such as New Scientist should put you right. If you’re writing a novel, of course, get out there and talk to some real scientists. If there’s one thing scientists have in common, it’s a great desire to set you straight on the facts. Most will be glad to help, especially if they get a copy of the book at the end of it all. Scientists love to get books.

Finally, if you’re looking for ideas, the popular scientific magazines are the best place to start. Frogs levitating in magnetic fields. Three-kilometre deep ice cores from Antarctica. Bacteria that produce sulphuric acid from traffic fumes. Bodies preserved in peat for thousands of years.

These are just some of the things the real-life mad scientists are working on. Just take those ideas a little past reality and you’ll get a story, and since you’ve taken the idea from a real report, you’ll get the facts right as well.

Contents

Cooking Up a Cannibal in your Horror Fiction?

June 2004

Mmm… tastes like chicken.

Except it doesn’t. It tastes like pork, but a little bit spicier. So says Armin Meiwes, the cannibal of Rotenburg, before he was jailed on January 30 this year. If you’re thinking of committing a crime in Germany, just remember who’s waiting in that jail.

Cannibalism goes back to the beginning of humanity and is still practised today. What? You thought it was something from stories? Wild cannibal tribes with very British explorers in big pots, adding in carrots and onions to disguise the taste of pith-helmet and pomposity? No, the human body has always been a good source of protein. Our earliest ancestors had to struggle for every mouthful of food, so when one of them died, would they really leave all that protein to rot away? Heck, if they didn’t eat their dead, the wolves and hyenas would have.

The tradition survives even today, where some societies believe that eating the dead helps to keep them alive in spirit, if not in body. To be eaten after death would be a great honour and a guarantee of immortality. Not to be eaten would mean rejection and ultimate damnation.

Maybe that’s why Armin Meiwes had no trouble finding a volunteer for lunch. It made his case a difficult one since he had videotaped his victim throughout. He had contacted his menu item through an Internet chat room, invited him home, taped the victim agreeing to be eaten and they had even shared a meal of part of the man before Meiwes finished him off. Which part? Let’s just say it would have fitted a hot-dog roll.

There have been many cannibals in our allegedly civilised society over the years. Fritz Harmann killed at least 26 men, drank their blood and sold the meat on the black market. Fortunately for the rest of us, he was beheaded in 1925. I wonder what his customers thought when he came to trial?

More recently, Antron Singleton, a Texas rap singer, ate his roommate after an angel-dust binge in April 2002.

Here in Scotland, Allan Menzies killed his best friend, drank his blood and ate part of his head in December 2002. This was near Edinburgh, where historic tales of cannibal families abound. These, however, were probably largely myth, made up by the English to justify the Clearances, where land was occupied by English lords and most of the Scots were kicked out.

Famous fiction cannibals include Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street, in London. You’d go in for a haircut and come out as a tray of pies. Never use a barber’s shop that’s located above a bakery. You’re just asking for trouble.

Cannibalism featured as central themes in ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’, ‘Silence of the Lambs’ and the science fiction film ‘Soylent Green’. It even appeared in the fantasy ‘Conan the Barbarian’. Cannibalism is genre-proof, it can add a touch of horror to any story.

There is a downside to having a friend for lunch, aside from the inconvenience of arrest and imprisonment. Human protein is exactly what your body needs, it fits right in there with minimum conversion, unlike plant or animal proteins. Unfortunately, so do diseases. If you eat pork that’s infected with a pig disease, chances are it won’t be able to infect you. If you fill up on ‘long pig’, a slang term for human flesh, then any diseases in that meat are guaranteed to get you. That includes the prion diseases like mad cow disease. It’s known as ‘kuru’ in some parts of the world and you get it from eating Grandpa’s brain when he dies. Make sure your friend gets a full medical before he arrives for dinner.

Let’s not forget the soul. Eating another human is, in some cultures, a way of keeping the dead person’s soul alive. Is the soul you’re munching the sole soul in that flesh? Or does it have a little extra flavour, something crunchy, something scaly, something from another world, a world of torment?

While we’re considering the supernatural, spare a thought for the graveyard ghoul. Are they cannibals? It’s hard to be sure. Ghouls only work as cannibals if you consider them as degenerate humans. If they’re demons, they’re another species so it’s not cannibalism, its predation. That reminds me, I haven’t seen a good ghoul story in a very long time.

So, get out your cookbook and check out recipes. Something for the bake-sale next week, if you have the materials to hand.

All this talk of eating is making me peckish. Who’s for some lady fingers?

Contents

From Invisible Man to 40-foot Woman.

September 2004

I’ve always believed the most brutal, vicious, terrifying monsters are human. Starting off with a human gives a story immediacy