The Crowd

 "Right now, I want to throw that word 'escape' out the window. In speaking of these stories, these fantasies, I would like to emphasize instead their contribution toward growth and responsibility, small as it may be. Stories can ony be labeled "escapist" if they solve problems by ignoring or destroying them. Mickey Spillane's characters, for instance, in another genre, shoot first so they will not have to ask or answer questions later.

Thoughtful men find many things in our civilized order worth—not escaping—but growing away from: the preconceived notion, prejudice, bias, dogma, of any kind whatever. Through our creative arts, including fantastic literature, we can return to the raw stuff of environment for re-seasoning, for an understanding of the wilderness, the animal, the death which tempts us to solve problems with annihilation. Seeking help from literary sources, we often appear blasphemous and "escapist" to those still in the temple, political gymnasium, or school. Actually, we are only 'standing off for a long clear look at the human situation, preparing to doff old burdens in order to assume the new.

[...]

Man lives by creating and creates by alternating wonder with criticism followed by new states of wonder."

 

Ray Bradbury - 1956 editor's introduction to the fantasy collection The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories

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When did I buy my copy of The October Country? Early teens, early '90s. The '80s paperback version was still on the shelves. It expanded my understanding of the word "horror" beyond slasher flicks and creature features to those more diffuse fears I had been taught to ignore. Fear of being ugly and despised, subverted by your own body, of being trapped and tethered, of loneliness, of the slow grinding passage of time. Hopes lost and the self dissipated. But though Uncle Einar, The Emissary or The Cistern made more of an impact on me, The Crowd maintained a background fascination for making much of so little.

 

"The crowd looked at him and he looked back at them and did not like them at all. There was a vast wrongness to them. He couldn't put his finger on it. They were far worse than this machine-made thing that happened to him now.
The ambulance doors slammed. Through the windows he saw the crowd looking in, looking in. That crowd that always came so fast, so strangely fast, to form a circle, to peer down, to probe, to gawk, to question, to point, to disturb, to spoil the privacy of a man's agony by their frank curiosity."

 

It was only after moving to Chicago that I learned one of the most infuriating terms in the lexicon of mob stupidity: gaper's delay. Highways bottlenecked not by traffic accidents but by moronic hordes slowing their cars to gawp at the wreck. ("Rubberneckers" they also call 'em - cause even if you hung them from the nearest branch like they deserve, they'd bounce up and down endlessly blocking your way.) More infuriating are those who try to excuse such behavior by saying that "they're just people" or "it's only human" because of course they're right. It is human. Normal human behavior. Reiterated behind millions of windshields. An overwhelming, pervasive tribal ape need to participate in the suffering of others.

 

"It was like a great rainstorm, with many drops, heavy and light and medium, touching the earth. He waited a few seconds and listened to their coming and their arrival. Then, weakly, expectantly, he rolled his head up and looked.
The crowd was there.
He could smell their breaths, the mingled odors of many people sucking and sucking on the air a man needs to live by. They crowded and jostled and sucked and sucked all the air up from around his gasping face until he tried to tell them to move back, they were making him live in a vacuum."

 

I had not appreciated, reading The Crowd so young, why it stuck with me, that it is not a story about traffic accidents at all, its events almost irrelevant when compared to the language in which they're described, the dripping disgust at compulsive group participation. This is a night for storytelling, and to most that means dissimulating and externalizing. The stories we tell ourselves keep us safe from deeper horrors. Chief among these the cozy belief that the monster is an alien thing, lurking out there in the dark beyond the safety of our campfire.

 

Except we killed those monsters a thousand, ten thousand years ago. The Nemean Lion's bones have long since rotted away, and the rest of the biosphere is following. A million species which took fifty million years to develop must die, not so that sapience might adventure to the stars or rise above the limitations of flesh, not for great works of art, philosophy and science, but so that billions of sacks of redundant simian flesh can hold hot-dog eating contests and bow for the ten thousandth time at a meteor or an elephant-headed statue or drawl patriotic songs into half-empty bottles of vodka or praise The Party while it grinds them into five-year plans. And any individual who disapproves of this grand nine-billion-fold pinnacle of creation must be silenced, effaced, erased, unmade, made one with the herd or the ground beneath its hooves. Don't you dare tell them they could or should be better.

 

The monster is ever-encroaching normalcy. It is every subhuman degenerate whose personality is the logo on its t-shirt or purse and the slogan on its throw-pillow or baseball cap. Is that not what every fanged and goggle-eyed mask would reveal if dropped, the very necessity for masks, for costumes, for uniforms and business casual attire? To camouflage the shame, the filth, the degeneracy of humanity? Enforced ignorance.

 

"that's the way it's been since time began, when crowds gather. You murder much easier, this way. Your alibi is very simple; you didn't know it was dangerous"

 

And for the proprietors of the apocalypse, a more refined torture: knowing you cannot escape the unknowing. What use is your prepared folder of evidence and reasoned argument when they have brute impact? They will make you one of their own, clean up your ragged frills of analysis and argumentation, smooth out the wrinkles in your brain, make you happy, make you excited at the prospect of the spectacle of the crash. No wonder, no criticism, just the mob and its appetites.

 

And the crash.