Treating Characters with Dignity (or not)

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was watching the anime Bleach.  This post is not about the show; it's just that it made me think about the idea of treating characters with dignity—or not treating them with dignity.  Anime makes this concept easy to see (if your character makes a crazy silly cartoon face because they’re upset, you’re not treating them with dignity), but the concept holds true throughout all stories.

I’ll try to break it down a bit.

Treating a character with dignity means never making fun of him or inviting your reader to laugh at him.

Now, the interesting thing about this is that you aren’t changing what the characters are doing or feeling, only how you are presenting their actions and thoughts.  It’s irrelevant whether your character is dignified or not.  It’s entirely possible to treat an undignified character with dignity or vice versa.  Indeed, in real life, treating yourself with dignity generally doesn’t mean being rigid and proper all the time—it means being okay with looking stupid. 

Think about acting.  If an actor is embarrassed and acting like he thinks he looks ridiculous, then he will look ridiculous.  If he instead totally gets into his role, he’ll look awesome—even if his acting isn’t all that great.  In real life, if you get up to give a speech and rub your hands awkwardly and say, “Ah, this is awkward; I haven’t prepared” you’ll look pathetic.  If you get up and give the crowd a big cheesy grin and announce that you haven’t prepared, you’ll look great.

In stories, a villain who tries to make the beautiful princess marry him can certainly look ridiculous, pathetic, and laughable—or he can look tragic, pitiable, and romantic (a la Phantom of the Opera).  Likewise, if the villain loses his temper and starts screaming threats, the author can make him look silly or she can make him look terrifying, but—and note this—she cannot do both simultaneously.

Denying a villain dignity will rob him of his power to scare the reader.

Which may be what you want.  Indeed, this is a very powerful tool in real life: if you can make your opponent look ridiculous, then 99% of the time, you have won the psychological battle—and the rest follows quickly.

For some stories, a villain treated without dignity for laughs is great fun, but I’ve also seen it done in a way that totally undermined the story simply because the author didn't understand.  I once edited a book in which the protagonist was strong and perfect and the villain was weak and cowardly.  I tried to explain to the author that this made me want to root for the villain, because the villain was the underdog and I couldn't identify with the protagonist . . . and the author responded by making the villain even more weak and cowardly and thus even more of an underdog.  By treating his villain without dignity and asking the reader to laugh at  how weak he was (and doing the opposite with his hero), what author accomplished was that he evoked sympathy for the villain and got the reader to side with the villain.

Sigh.  But on the plus side, this leads us to my next point:

Treating a character with dignity creates a barrier between character and reader; treating a character without dignity brings character and reader closer together.

Have you ever tried to be close buddies with someone who’s distant and aloof?  Do you even want to be friends with such people?  Aloofness creates a do-not-mess-with-me barrier.  (This may or may not be intentional; the trick, in books and real life, is to recognize what you’re doing and use it appropriately.)  I’ve used proper politeness in real life as a means of defense—and of forcing a dangerous party to act properly toward me.  It doesn’t always work, but I believe it has several times kept me safe. Now, in a story, it's whether you treat the character with dignity (not whether the character is dignified) that creates the barrier.  So ask yourself: Do I want to create a barrier?

It depends on your aim.  I’d say that 99.99% of the time, you do not want to create a barrier around your protagonist, because you want your reader to identify with him.  But beyond that, it depends on what you’re aiming for with each character.

Which characters should you treat with dignity?  It’s up to you.  Just make sure you’re making the choice purposefully and that you know the consequences of it.

Stop Cheating Your Reader

As a writer, reader, and editor, I believe very strongly in not cheating.  This can take several forms, but what it comes down to is this:

Cheating means taking the easy way out instead of giving the reader satisfaction.

Every writer has things they’re good at writing and things they’re bad at—and every writer has things that come easily and things that are hard.  To give an extreme example: I once edited an action thriller novel . . . that had no action in it.  The entire thing was dialogue scenes about the action.  So in one scene, the characters would be talking about this terrifically difficult and dangerous heist they were going to pull, and in the next scene, they were talking about how, yes, the heist went off just fine.

Are you kidding me?  Where’s my heist?  You can’t dangle that in front of us and not show it!  That’s cheating!

But I get it: cheating is awfully tempting.  My guess is that that particular author found action sequences difficult to write, and so just wrote around them.  I don’t find action difficult to write—my struggles come with interpersonal-relationship-growth sequences.  They’re really, really tough for me, but they need to be done in order to achieve a satisfying story.  So I write them even though they're really hard for me.

But I didn’t actually write this post to talk about cheating by avoiding writing particular scenes but about cheat endings.  I once saw these called “weasel-y ways out,” and that’s a pretty good description.

Cheat endings are endings that use convenience to avoid consequences and to reset the circumstances to what they were at the beginning of the story.

Here are some common ones:

·       It was all a dream!

·       Then all the people not in-the-know lost their memories

·       Then the protagonist lost his memory and went back to life as usual

·       Once the bad guy was defeated, the protagonist lost his powers

With very, very few exceptions, these are horrible endings.  They’re vastly unsatisfying—and they’re generally completely unnecessary.  Why did it have to all be a dream?  Why couldn’t it have just been real?  Why couldn’t the entirety of New York have seen the aliens/magic and this spiked a new age?  Why couldn’t our protagonist have remained awesome and kept moving forward instead of regressing—thus completely undoing all the growth we spent the entire book on?

For a book to be satisfying, actions need to have consequences.

I specified earlier dream/lose memory/lose powers endings were cheating because they relied on author convenience.  If you’re writing a series, it’s really tough to have your whole world change, so you may come up with a convenient way to avoid this.  If your focus really, really isn’t on the change, then you might want to come up with a way around it—but:

Unless you fully integrate a reset ability in your universe (a la Men in Black), then resetting is cheating. 

If you’re wondering how this rant came about, it’s because I spent countless hours with a series, only for the protagonist to lose all his powers and get sent back to square one.  It was so frustrating.  It was a lazy way to get him a slightly different power set when he got his power back—but we’d already seen him gain power; we didn’t need to see it again.  Besides, the powers he'd had before were far from fully explored, and if he kept them, there would be some difficult consequences; so robbing him of his powers was a lazy way for the author to avoid dealing with the consequences of him having them.

To add insult to injury, the protagonist’s friends had just witnessed his immense powers for the first time—and we didn’t even get to see their reactions or what happened the next time he (sheepishly) came up to them.  What an amazing scene that would be!  Awkwardly explaining that, heh, yes, he was one of the most powerful people in the universe . . . funny how these things happen.

It would have been amazing to see that protagonist go forward, now that his powers were too great to be easily controlled.  It would have been incredible to see him interact with his friends after they saw him as he was.  And instead, he became a normal boy again, the end.

I just felt so . . . cheated.

I called 911 yesterday . . .

I was walking my dog Flora around my parents’ neighborhood and talking on the phone with a friend.  

Suddenly, I hear a gunning engine and squealing tires.  I turn, and see a black Ford car turning wildly on top of the raised median in the middle of the street.  The car turns my way and accelerates at me.  I calculate which way to go and run up hill away from it, putting more fence between us and pulling Flora along.

The car crashes through the wooden fence and hits more fence, shattering its windshield.  The car screeches to a stop and then hurls backwards, accelerating back off the sidewalk, across the street, and up onto the median again—and taking a huge chunk of wood-and-wire fence with it, which it deposits on the median.

The car turns crazily and then slams on the acceleration again, bulleting through a different section of fence, across a dipped patch of grass.  I’m already dialing 911.  The car stops, rams backwards, destroying more fence.  I’m on the phone with the operator, spitting out the license plate number, the make and color, and the cross streets.  The car accelerates forward again at yet more fence and hits it at speed.  But it also hits pots full of concrete and gets wedged on them.  Two wooden fence posts impale the windshield.  The driver tries to keep driving but can’t. 

Three passersby come up to the driver and try to talk with her.  I stay down the street, unwilling to get closer to this lunatic and still on the phone with the 911 operator, who is telling me to breathe.  I am nice to her, and don’t explain that although I’m hyped up on adrenaline and speaking quickly, I’m neither afraid nor panicking.  It was just too weird, too fast, too dissociating to be traumatic.  What are we in, a B movie?  

The driver finally gets out of her car.  She’s white with brown hair, wearing (I tell the 911 operator), neutral gray-brown slacks and a matching patterned shirt.  She’s an adult of indeterminate age, and having trouble standing.  She is now attempting to get back into her car and not doing a great job of it.  She finally manages it, and pushes a wooden fence post out her shattered windscreen with her bare hand.  I know she’s going to attempt to start driving again, but that’s when the police cars arrive, sirens blaring and lights flashing.

It’s been not even two minutes.

The driver gets out of the car and talks to the police officers.  One asks her to walk in a straight line, but she can’t; she can barely stand.  She shows him her hands, which are covered in blood.  I can hear only part of what is said, I’m so far away.  But she says her name she doesn’t remember the accident.

The police interview another witness, a lady who lives nearby and only saw part of it, and was one of the three who came up to ask if the driver was all right.  I’m left to wait for now; I think the police aren’t sure if I’m just a rubbernecker, but the 911 lady told me to wait.  It’s mildly hot, and Flora is upset.  My friend calls me and asks what happened—I said “oh my gosh,” there was a clatter (had I dropped my phone?  No, it was the fence) and then the call ended.  I’d forgotten I’d been on the phone with her, and I briefly explained.

The police officer asked the driver her name.  It was Debbie, of all things . . .

A police van, a policeman on motorcycle, a fire truck, and an ambulance join the scene.  Debbie is strapped into the ambulance and taken away.  I wonder if I can leave.  A police officer finally comes up to me and asks if I’m a witness.  I tell him that yes, in fact, I saw the whole thing—she nearly ran me over, and I called 911. . . .

He explains that Debbie is not a DUI but severely diabetic and having a low blood sugar blackout.  On top of that, she’s hearing impaired—hence why she wasn’t communicating well with the passersby.  She will be held responsible, of course, and will have to take better care of herself if she wants to keep driving.  He’s glad I’m not hurt.

Later that day, I take my mom to show her the spot so she can visualize it, and we meet the owner of the fence.  He apparently came home to a bafflingly ruined fence and a note on his door from the police.  The smashed car is gone, and the bits of fence scattered on the sidewalk and median have been tidied up.  I explain to him what happened.  He says he’s diabetic and has family members with severe diabetes, and that you can feel problems coming on and deal with them before they get back (instead of getting behind the wheel).  He always keeps candy bars with him.

So that was fun.

(On a side note: my first cousin once removed, who's English (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasper_Griffin), once remarked that he rather enjoys the American way of telling stories in present tense.  I almost always think about that when I tell stories like this because, yes, I pretty much always do so in present.)

Understanding Magic

A couple of years ago, I read a book that went something like this:

Villain creates a doppelganger of a girl.  In order to survive, the doppelganger must devour the girl’s possessions: this restores the doppelganger’s power and likeness.  The villain tells the doppelganger that in order to live a full life, the doppelganger must devour the girl.  Instead, the doppelganger teams up with someone who has a convenient magical watch who can extend her life.  It works, the villain has a Disney death, the end.

I was appalled by this solution.  In addition to being unsatisfying and full of plot holes, I said to myself: This author doesn’t understand magic!

Oh?  Then what should the solution have been?

The doppelganger should have eaten the villain!  We know she restores her power by eating, and the villain was the ultimate source of the magic that kept her going—and that would have satisfyingly defeated the villain in a way that made sense and wasn’t simply convenient.

Now, from a storytelling perspective, I stand by this.  But what a strange thing to think: “This author doesn’t understand magic!”  Understand magic?  Magic isn’t real!  Why am I treating it as a universal?

Contrast this to a book I just finished rereading for the first time in years: Clive Barker’s The Thief of Always.  I don’t usually do this, but while reading it, which approaching the climax, I thought: This author understands magic.

Again, what a peculiar thing to think!  Why do I feel that I (or anyone else) can understand magic in the same way I understand weather or seasons or food?  Magic isn’t real! 

And yet I do find that I have a very solid and stubborn understanding of what magic is and is not.  The rules change, but there the essence, the ultimate base underlying principal, does not:

Magic is a raw, wild thing, though it may sometimes seem tame.  It works by primeval laws.  The deeper and older the magic, the more this is true, and the more it demands blood and sacrifice—and not necessarily the kind you expect.

Where do I get this idea?  Because although my understanding is not uncommon, it’s also not universal.  Have I gotten it from the books I’ve consumed, especially those I consumed in my formative years?  The Narnia books have magic like this; so does Diana Wynne Jones.  So do so many other authors.  So do many of the books I had read to me when I was very small—Lawrence Yep’s Dragon Quartet, for example.  But I don’t get my idea of magic only from words of the past century; it’s much older than that:

This is the sort of magic one finds in fairytales.

I’m not just talking about the Brothers Grimm here.  As a child, as today, I love reading fairytales from around the world.  The details change, but underlying them, the rawness is there: it is there in Chinese, Japanese, Russian, German, Romanian, Norwegian, and Celtic folklore—and a great many other places besides, whose stories I have read less recently.  It is in the folklore of countries divided by time and culture and distance, individually developing their own versions of vampires, ghosts, tricksters, and child-snatchers—of the monsters that live in the forest and in the lake and under the bed; of the things that only come out at night. 

Magic is the power of fear given manifestation—and stories are the manifestation of hope and the human spirit given to defeat that power (and, sometimes, to harness it; and it often allows itself to be harnessed, though deep in its heart, it never fully forgets that it was once a wild thing).

So now I have put into words, however clumsy, my understanding of magic.  No wonder I write so many monsters in my books.

Ruined by the Reveal

Within the past few months, I’ve read two books that struck me because they very dramatically failed in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reason.  One was middle-grade fantasy horror; the other was adult survival horror.  Both books went like this:

First half: extremely creepy build up, 4.5/5 stars.  Couldn’t put it down.

Middle: reveal of the big bad and thorough explanation of what’s actually going on.

Second half: fight/escape the big bad.  2/5 stars.  I had trouble finishing.

I don’t read much adult horror, but I do love middle-grade (and sometimes juvenile and YA) horror.  So I started thinking about the books in that category that I love:  Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, Joseph Delaney’s The Spook’s Apprentice, Chris Priestley’s Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror, Jonathan Stroud’s The Screaming Staircase—and even things like Roald Dahl’s The Witches and the film Alien.

So what do all these books (and movie) have in common?

There’s no big reveal.

Beyond that, they fall into two categories:

     1. The reader is never given any real explanation of our villain, though we are given clues (Coraline, Alien).  This is tense because it plays on our fear of the unknown.  We know the villain is scary, but not the limits of their power—which means we don’t know how to defeat them.

     2. The reader is told exactly what we’re facing beforehand (The Spook’s Apprentice, The Screaming Staircase, The Witches).  This is tense because we know how scary the villain is—and that they might unpredictably come at us and overpower us from any angle.

In film critique, jump scares are generally considered cheap scares that do more harm than good, because after the initial jolt of adrenaline, the watcher is released from tension.  Anything that interrupts a story or takes the reader out of the moment will undo the previous tension build and force the tension build to restart—and, often, make it harder to restart.

(Note here that I’m not talking about things like humor that is part of the story and makes sense with the characters.  In The Screaming Staircase, the protagonists are cracking jokes and bickering during the tensest part of the book—and their doing so only increases the tension.  The Screaming Staircase is both the funniest book on my list and the scariest.)

So let’s go back to the initial two books and take another look at how they ruined themselves.  One at a time:

In the adult book:

BUILD: our protagonists are trapped in a creepy cave with limited supplies and horrifying but mysterious things keep happening.

RUIN: Reveal: it’s aliens building Noah’s Ark!

MY REACTION: That is so stupid, I just can’t take this book seriously anymore.

In the MG book:

BUILD: our protagonists are trapped in a creepy house by creepy old women who claim to be their grandmothers, and they’re beginning to lose their minds.

RUIN: Reveal: actually, the grandmothers are only minions for a big boss.  After the generic boss is revealed, both the grandmothers and the house are no longer in the story.

MY REACTION: So . . . I’m supposed to care about generic bad guy in generic bad guy location?  No.  You should’ve kept the interesting villains—the story I invested in.

This goes back to something I discussed in my last post: bigger is not always better, and more dramatic is often merely melodramatic.  If the villains in the first book had been never explained creepy cave creatures, the book would’ve kept its tension and gotten scarier.  If the second book had kept its creepy grandmothers and house, likewise.  But revealing them as aliens/ a fear queen just squandered the build.

Ultimately, both books simply made me sad.  They could have been so good—they were at first—but they relegated themselves to 3 stars each for me, and will soon be buried in my Goodreads history, never to be picked up again.  But I am grateful to them, because they revealed to me what I need to do—or not do—if ever I write MG horror of my own.

UPDATE: I've been in a little discussion about what makes a good reveal, since they do exist.  And I would put it this way: a good reveal does NOT change the story (in both the negative examples above, the books felt like two unconnected halves); instead, it shifts the camera.  It solves the mystery.  It shifts perception, of the reader or protagonist or (often) both.  It shows the reader what the reader already had all the clues to put together, and gives an "ah ha!  Now I understand!" moment.  The Sixth Sense does this very well.  I'm told both The Ring and Session 9 do as well, but as I've not seen either one, I cannot comment on them.

The Best Fight Sequence

I just can't stop thinking about the fight sequence I saw this week.  It really struck me on any number of levels: totally epic and awesome, yes, but not just that.  So here are some thoughts on what made it so amazing.

I’ve seen a lot of Doctor Who—more or less every episode from Doctors 3-11, in fact.  And again and again, I’ve noticed that the bigger the purported stakes of an episode, the lesser the actual stakes—because when the stakes are too high, the Doctor cannot lose.  The show runners are not going to end the Doctor’s life permanently, and they aren’t going to destroy the Earth and they definitely are not going to destroy the entire universe and all time and space.  So if those are the purported stakes, then there are no actual stakes.  On the other hand, Doctor Who as a show has shown a willingness to kill off characters you’ve just met and come to care about in an episode.

To have actual stakes:

1. The audience must care about what’s at stake (which requires universe consistency)

2. It must be possible for the hero to lose

It’s not Doctor Who I’ve been watching recently, however, but the anime Bleach.  I’ve just finished the third season, and it had one of the single best and most memorable fight scenes I’ve ever encountered in anything.  Let me explain.  (Will include spoilers.)

In Bleach, there are special living swords that can be unlocked to greater power.  There are two stages of unlocking, and the greater stage is called Bankai.  Bankai is different for each sword, but frequently involves the sword turning into a giant monster to fight beside its person.

In order to defeat a powerful opponent, our hero, Ichigo, learns how to release his Bankai.  And the truth was, I was absolutely dreading seeing his Bankai.  We’d already had a giant ice dragon and a giant fire phoenix and a giant acid-spewing baby and a giant snake.  They had cool designs, but ultimately—was Ichigo’s Bankai just going to be another big monster?  Or maybe some souped-up version of his ability to shoot energy from his sword?  I shrank back in my chair and prepared to be underwhelmed.

And then.

And then I saw his Bankai, and I almost cried, it was so utterly brilliant.  Because it wasn’t a giant monster or a fancy light effect.  No: his Bankai form was him . . . merged with the spirit form of his sword.  Visually, it was striking and immediately obvious—and it also fit his character perfectly.  And I'd never in a million years have expected it.

Every hero has different tools or weapons.  Making these clever, making these fit the character and environment, makes a huge difference.  Bigger is generally not better.

Jackie Chan is famous for making good use of his environment for action scenes, and that’s part of it: variety.  But ultimately, his weapon is not any one external tool but his martial arts—his body and how he uses it, just as Ichigo’s weapon is his living sword.  In Star Wars, the Emperor’s primary weapon isn’t Force lightning or his lightsaber: its his precognition and scheming ability.  And these things are also integral to his personality.

But wait, there’s a twist.

Bleach has a LOT of fight sequences.  Ichigo can lose, and people you care about can die (stakes!) and the weapons and characters are (mostly) extremely varied and interesting.  When I saw Ichigo’s Bankai, it made me deeply happy, and I was prepared to sit out the rest of the fight sequence contentedly. 

And then Ichigo lost.  His Bankai had put too much stress on him.  He was dying.  His opponent was about to kill him.  And . . .

And he did not suddenly find strength, and he was not suddenly saved.  Instead, for the second time in one fight sequences, the tables were turned on the audience.  Something happened that I had no idea was even possible, but which perfectly fit the clues we'd been getting.

You see, in order to go on his current mission, Ichigo had had to undergo some very difficult training.  During one point in that training, he became possessed by a monster (a “Hollow”) and barely threw off the possession at the last moment.  Hollows always wear masks, and a couple of times after that, Ichigo mysteriously found a mask that had saved him from death.  But that had last been many episodes ago.

So: Ichigo is a moment from death, and . . . a mask begins to grow on his face.  He is possessed, and the insane Hollow begins to fight using his body.

The best action sequences move the plot beyond simply who wins.  They involve character development, learning, and changes—and these, too, are stakes.

It helped that Ichigo’s opponent was incredibly interesting and one we’d come to know and respect over the course of the show . . . but that was just icing on the cake.

I am so impressed right now.

Igor

(It's a little late for Halloween, but I found this story jotted in a notebook and thought I'd share it.  If nothing else, it's sure to remind me to do my anti-scoliosis physical therapy.)

His back hurt.  That was one of the constants in his life.  Sometimes it burned or spasmed or shrieked up his neck or down his leg, and usually it ached—as his spine crushed the muscles inside the curves and stretched those outside and pushed his ribs around. He did not know what it was like to be without pain; he had been born twisted.

His mother had been horrified, when he’d emerged, his ear nearly touching his shoulder.  Some of his earliest memories were of horrified faces quickly withdrawn, of repulsed voices asking what was the matter with him.  Nobody ever smiled.

In those days, his parents still had hope that he would grow out of it, and subjected him to many agonizing traction treatments.  But when it became clear the mutation of his spine had damaged his brain, his parents topped bothering.  What was the use?  He would never be able to even speak clearly; grunts and gesticulations were all he could manage.  He was doomed to be the village idiot, no better than an animal.  And everyone knew that animals didn’t have proper emotions or feel pain the way people do.

He knew he was inferior.  For years, he thought “ugly” as much his name as “Igor,” and responded accordingly.  He could not jump or dance like the others; his every attempt at lightness ended in broad clumsiness.

Yet nature had another trick to play on him.  Had he been straight, he would have been a world champion; twisted, he was merely prodigiously strong.  He could lift carts and sheep and fallen trees, and in this way, he earned a slight living—enough that he neither froze nor starved.

In this way, also, he made his tormentors afraid of him.

His heart hurt.  That was another of the constants in his life.  His heart hurt, and he hated everyone.

Then the stranger came.  He was tall and straight, with an aristocratic profile and sleek black hair graying about the temples.  He arrived in an elegant black carriage with an unfamiliar coat of arms painted on the side.

Immediately, Igor jumped forward to hold the horses, hoping for a tip.  The horses did not balk from him as long as they remained under the stranger’s hand.  But the moment the stranger jumped down, the horses kicked and blew, wild to kick him.  Igor hung on grimly, grunting with effort.

The stranger observed this with dark eyes, then laid one hand on the nearest horse’s neck.  Both animals calmed immediately.

“You are strong,” the stranger said, looking Igor up and down.  His voice was cool, neither praising nor condemning, and Igor basked in it.

“I have business to attend do,” the stranger went on.  “Watch my horses while I am gone.”

Igor nodded enthusiastically, even as the stranger strode off.  He remained there nearly three hours, guarding the horses, not moving to the left or to the right.

The stranger returned and saw this.  Without a word of thanks, he mounted his carriage, and tossed Igor a silver coin for his service.

A silver coin was more money than Igor had had in his life.  He stared at it in awe, then clutched it to his chest possessively.

The stranger came visiting often after that, and each time, Igor leapt forward to hold his horses.  When other entrepreneurial souls tried to take his place, he beat them back mercilessly, and the stranger did not rebuke him.

With his increasing wealth, Igor purchased a brush and bucket so he could care for the horses in the stranger’s absence.  He gloried in his newfound position.  But the more proud he became of his duties, the more hostile and suspicious the other villagers became.  Young women had been sickening; some had died.  And always, it was worse after the stranger visited. 

It became so bad that the next time the stranger visited, the villagers met him in a mob, bearing foul-smelling herbs, wild roses, and crucifixes carved from mountain ash.  They surrounded the carriage, and Igor saw they meant to hurt him.  He roared and lunged at them, swinging a stick and breaking bones until they scattered.

On his carriage, the stranger watched coolly, not interfering. “I’m told your name is Igor,” he said, when the last villager had fled.

Igor signed that this was correct.  He knew the stranger’s name, too—Count Dinu. 

“We are alike, Igor,” the Count mused.  “At once monster and human.  Come work for me.  Do all I say, and you shall have food, live in a castle, and have as much money as your shriveled heart desires.”  And he smiled at him.

Igor would have licked burning coals for the Count.  He prostrated himself and swore in gobbled grunts to be his.

Two decades passed.  The Count did not treat Igor well, but he kept his word.  Igor brought him supplies and showed him where beautiful young women lived.  He was despised by all he met, and he despised them in turn.  None could match the Count.

But Igor made a mistake.  The girl he found, a succulent sixteen, was courted by three men, two foreign, each brave and upright.  They waited until noon and then stormed the castle while Igor was away.  In Igor’s absence, they stabbed the Count through the heart, sawed off his head, and stuffed his mouth with foul herbs.

Igor came upon them as they left, congratulating one another and embracing the girl.  Wild, hot agony scorched him and searing cold flooded his brain.  He tore all four of them apart and howled and fell to his knees and beat his chest, but it was too late.  His master was dead, and he could not bring him back.

For a year and a day, he remained in that castle, feral and agonized.  And then he set out into the world, to find a new master.