End Of The World

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

                             -- The Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot

The world has not ended yet. That means in 2011 Mr. Camping was wrong -- what a surprise that was, huh?  And now it looks like after waiting all this time, 2012 will just buzz on by.

Here are my favorite fiction books about the end of the world:

1. The Stand.  I love this book!  Both in its original form and in the larger format.  The story is a lot of fun.  King does not use bombs to end the world, but a plague.  Further, he ties this super plague to Biblical prophecy, giving the novel a unique edge.

2. Darkness on the edge of town.  I like this book a lot!  Brian Keene is a great author.  Told in the first person, it does not give all the final answers the reader wants.  There are things that drive me a little nuts in this book. They sure can see a lot in the dark!  (mustard stains on a shirt and so on).  

3. The mist.  The novella did not answer as many questions as the movie does.   The reader is left suspecting the strange  mist with its monsters has taken over the world.

4. Swan Song.  Easily compared to The Stand -- to McCammon's consternation! -- the book brings a quick end to the world via nuclear war.  After that, the girls Swan and her protector, Josh, must fight evil that comes from the rubble.  It's good stuff, really.  

5. Lucifer's Hammer.  How about a big rock -- that would end  life on earth, right?  Well, almost!  This novel has a lot of strong elements.  The writing is good.  There is a lot of action.  Even some war.  And the science is pretty strong. 

6. On The Beach.  Chalk it up to those nukes again -- on the beach takes place after world war 3.

7.  The Martian Chronicles.  Nukes... again.  The book moves a small band of humans to Mars just in time to blow up our planet.  Of course, we kill the Martians with our germs (War of the World's reversed.)  After that, it's our planet!  Will we take better care of Mars than we did earth?  No!  

Of interest to me (but  not yet read)

1. The Last Man, Mary Shelly

2. The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard

3. The Age of Miracles, Karen Walker

4. The Road, Cormac McCarthy

Doomsday Preppers:

Author Stephen Tremp observes:

It seems many are expecting and even hoping for a Doomsday scenario. War, economic and political meltdown, disease, global warming, severe worldwide drought, and other cataclysmic events are what many believe will drive our personal worldwide doomsday. People are networking. They are preparing by stockpiling food, water, medical supplies, and guns. Web sites are plentiful. Just check out some of these YouTube Clips for the Doomsday Preppers.  (breakthroughblogs.blogspot.com)

Movies:

Oh my!  There are a lot of these!  My least favorite is Armageddon.  Who put guns on the spaceship?

A few end of the world movies:

• The Day After
• Deep Impact
• 2012
• The War of the Worlds
• The Day After Tomorrow
• Collision Earth
• Life after People
• The Day the Earth Caught Fire
• Meteor
• The Day The Sky Exploded
• By Dawns Early Light
• Earthstorm

Check out even more at www.allmovie.com

Going Biblical. . .

For a more serious discussion on the end times, look at Olivet discourse in Matthew 24.  Jesus uses a "duel" prophecy in order to ensure the truthfulness of his statements.  That is, he first foretells an event that would take place in the future -- but in the lifetime of eye witnesses; the destruction of the Jewish temple.  The synoptic Gospels were written before this event took place, yet recorded Jesus' prediction that the temple and Jerusalem would be crushed well before it happened.  Woven through the prophecy of  the destruction of Jerusalem is a larger prophecy of the Parousia (Second Coming) and final judgment.  So the short term prophecy is offered to give credibility to the far future prophecy.

And then there's. . . Left Behind.  I don't want to rant too much about this, because I respect  the intentions of the makers.  However, the rapture theory -- that Christians get sucked out of this world before things get really bad -- is simply not to be found in the pages of Scripture.  Beyond that, the movie's just not very good.  (Gasp) Same to be said for Omega Code -- only it's worse! 

Does the Bible point to a final end to planet earth?  Yes.  Not in the "Left Behind" Science Fiction way, though.  It speaks of final events, judgment of mankind, a fiery end to earth and a new beginning. 

Radio:

Radio destroyed the world many many times!  I think it was done most often by Arch Oboler.  Oboler gave us, "The Conqueror worms" and "The Word," and of course,  "Chicken Heart."  Yes, CHICKEN heart!  described  in Old Time Radio Catalog

Chicken Heart was another memorable Lights Out episode where a chicken heart is kept alive in a petri dish eventually starts growing and takes over the whole world. This episode influenced Stephen King and Bill Cosby described listening to this particular episode during one of his stand up comedy routines.

X minus 1 also destroyed the world -- but not as often as we would think!

The most famous destruction of earth came in 1938, when Mr. Orson Well's played The War of the World's.  People actually thought the world was ending! Author Andy Rausch and I talked about this  particular radio play when I interviewed him in October.

TSK: Since you participated in the Welles book, I'll ask you this... I've always been fascinated by the 1938 War of the Worlds fiasco. Do you think anything like that could ever happen again? 

Andy Rausch: No. Today we have so much information—maybe too much information—at our disposal at any given moment. I think you could maybe fool a few people here and there, but convincing that number of people that aliens are attacking seems unlikely.

Interview With Andy Rausch

TELL ME:
So,what are some of your favorite end of the world books, movies and radio plays? 

THE BUBBLE!

Remember all the complaining that went on when King published Under The Dome?  It was  compared to The Simpsons. I was doing some research today into Arch Oboler, one of the radio's great scare masters.

One of Oboler's films was titled, "The Bubble."  Guess what it was about!  From Wikipedia:

A young couple, Mark (Cole) and Katherine (Walley) are traveling on a small airplane and are forced to land in a remote town where the people are behaving oddly. They then attempt to escape from the town, but discover that there is a giant glass-like force field bubble around it that prevents anyone from leaving.

TCM gives a fuller synopsis, including these tidbits:

 the visitors discover that the area is covered by a huge, transparent dome and that once a week a resident disappears, presumably to be studied by the aliens who have trapped the community in a "zoo." Mark and Catherine take refuge in an old mill in the countryside while Mark attempts to dig an escape tunnel under the dome.

Unfortunately, the movie gets terrible reviews!  Apparently Oboler's great success in radio did not transfer naturally to the big screen.  Alas, the theater of the mind is best of all.  The poor reviews, bad acting, bad directing, might explain why Oboler chose  not to show viewers any of the film int he preview below!

The Man Who Scared Stephen King

I have really enjoyed Gerald Nachman’s book, “Raised On Radio.”  The book leaps neatly from genre to genre, show to show, giving readers the best of each subject and personality.  While some books on old radio are so massive they are nothing more than encylopedia’s – this book does not feel the need to give every detail.

I think radio is really much more scary, and powerful, than television or movies.  In fact, I think two of King’s work have translated nicely to radio – Pet Sematary and Salem’s Lot were both radio plays.  The 3D Mist was also a radio like experience that was nicely done.  I also think The Shining, Dolores Claighborn, and IT would all make great radio plays.

Know who I think would do a good job translating King to radio?  A guy named Arch Oboler.  He was reponsible for a program called “Lights Out Everybody.”  If you haven't’ heart it, quickly rush over to Internet Archive and turn out your lights. Unfortunately, he died in 1986.  Bummer!  (1987 -- that means he could have enjoyed Return of the Jedi without the experience being marred by the prequels!)

Nachman calls Oboler the "Edgar Allan Poe of the genre."

King's love for radio, and in particular Arch Oboler, is discussed on pages 314-315 of the hardcover, in a section titled, "Radio Noir -- Cops  and Grave Robbers."

I do not know where Nachman is getting his quotes from King, because I have long wondered  what King thought of Oboler's work.  I was glad to read these few paragraphs.  Check out the entire book, it's wonderful!

About King (and Oboler), Nachman writes the following:

One o the little boys Oboler scared half to death was the postmodern prince of horror, Stephen King, who has called Oboler “the genre’s prime auteur.”  King heard Lights Out reruns in the 1960s on Dimension X, recalling especially Ray Bradbury’s “Mars Is Heaven!”  “I didn’t sleep in my bed that night,” he remembered.  “That night I slept in the doorway, where the real and rational light of the bathroom bulb could shine in my face.  That was the power of radio at its height.”  Oboler, like Hitchcock, loved merging horror and humor into a gross-out giggle.  “Part of Oboler’s real genius was when ‘Chicken Heart’ ended, you felt like laughing and throwing up at the same time.

Oboler, said King, played on two of radio’s prime strengths: “The mind’s innate obedience, its willingness to try to see whatever someone suggests it see, no matter how absurd; the second is the fact that fear and horror and blinding emotions that knock our adult pins from beneath us and leave us groping in the dark like children who cannot find the light switch.  Radio is, of course, the ‘blind’ medium, and only Oboler used it so well or so completely.”  In radio, King obsverved, we never saw the zipper running down the monster’s back.

On TV, King said, The Shadow and Inner Sanctum over described scenes, whereas Oboler relied on speech, sound, and silence to achieve his effects.  He can’t forget the gruesome, “A Day at the Dentist,” in which a dentist extracts revenge from a patient who, years earlier ruined the dentists’s wife when she was a young girl.  With the patient strapped in his chair, the dentist drills a hole in him (“to let out some of lover-boy”), but the audience is left to guess where – his brain?  Heart?  Genitals?  The lone sound of a burrowing drill left listeners very much in the dark indeed.  Iing singles out radio’s ability to unlock the door of evil without “letting the monster out,” as movies or TV or theater would be forced to, because our eyes demand to know what’s behind the door; our ears leave the solution tantalizingly, and horrifyingly, up in the air.  Yet in the hands of a master radio storyteller like Oboler, we don’t feel heated.  We feel challenged. . . and chilled.

The author of The Shining, Carrie, and Misery remembers how, when Inner Sanctum left radio for TV, it finally made the creeding door visible, “And visible, it certainly was horrible enough – slightly askew, festooned with cobwebs – but it was something of a relief, just the same.  Nothing could have looked as horrible as that door sounded. . .”

There were weaknesses in Oboler's writing.  He was particularly fond of the monologue.  I guess in radio, it's one of the few ways to convey what's going on -- but sometimes Oboler's went on-and-on-and-on.

My favorite Arch Oboler "Lights Out" play was titled "Revolt Of The Worms."  (Brian Keene has a book that reminds me of this short radio play.)  The story "Murder Castle" reminds me very much of the documentary about H.H. Holmes, America's First Serial Killer.

Like King, Oboler was incredibly prolific.  He was a fast writer, known to leave a dinner party at 11pm and return at 1am with a finished script.  Where did he get his ideas?  Nachman fills in this interesting detail, "He often got  ideas  from listening to sound effects records, and took special delight in devising grotesque effects.  His scare tactics included the sound of a man frying int he electric chair (sizzling bacon), bones being snapped (spareribs or Life Savers crushed between teeth), heads  being severed (chopped cabbages), a knife slicing through a man's  body (a slab  of pork cut in two) and, most grisly of all, somebody eating human flesh (wet noodles squished with a bathroom plunger.)"

Does this sound familiar: Nachman quotes Oboler, "I didn't write about little green men. .  . monsters with dripping talons and grotesque faces from the special effects department. . . I wrote about the terrors and monsters within each of us."  (Well, he did write about worms!)  But the quote is very close to King saying he is more interested in the characters than the monsters.