Blog-o-ween 2023: "The Lake" by Tananarive Due

When I was a kid, my family would go to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, every year for vacation. We drove down from Western Pennsylvania in a caravan of other families from our neighborhood. Some years, we would even sync up our annual summer trip with a couple of families from other states that we had met in previous years so that we could all be together. The beachside hotel we stayed at felt like an extended family. It was all very chummy and inclusive. I used to love hitting the beach every day to build sand castles, to bury my friends in the sand, and to look for seashells and sand dollars. My favorite activity, however, was swimming in the ocean. I loved the sound of the waves striking the shore, the feel of the cool water as it enveloped me, the strength of the tide as it lifted me and brought me gently back to the earth. Like being at the hotel, being in the ocean felt chummy and inclusive, like I belonged there.

And then I saw Jaws.

And I discovered that the ocean may not be the friendly, playful companion that I always assumed it to be. There were things underneath the surface of the water, things with teeth like butcher knives, things with lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eyes, things that were hungry, things that liked to bite.

For years after, I did not like going into the ocean. Then, after seeing Friday the 13th, Piranha, and Alligator, I grew wary of lakes, rivers, and swimming pools, too. The water was a dangerous place to be! Therefore, in order to stay safe, one had to stay far away from it.

It never occurred to me that the monsters I feared beneath the waves could, like in today’s story from Tananarive Due, step out of the water and walk on land. And that their hunger would follow them, too.

Let’s take a trip down south to Florida and dip our toes in “The Lake.”

“The new English instructor at Graceland Prep was chosen with the greatest care, highly recommended by the Board of Directors at Blake Academy in Boston, where she had an exemplary career for twelve years. No history of irregular behavior presaged the summer’s unthinkable events.”

—Excerpt from an internal memo,

Gracetown Preparatory School

Gracetown, Florida

Abbie LaFleur, a native of Boston, MA, has just relocated to Gracetown, FL, to teach at a local prep school. She’s moved there in the heat and humidity of June to get a summer’s worth of teaching under her belt before the start of the school year proper. The colonial house that Abbie has moved into is isolated out in the woods and sits next to a very large lake. The house is too large for her, and will need a lot of work, but the lake becomes a source of comfort to Abbie. It calls to her, tells her to strip off her clothes and take a swim in it. Abbie does so at every given opportunity — during the day, during the night...during her dreams...

At work, Abbie makes friends quickly with the boys in her class, “strong and tireless boys, who could help her mend whatever needed fixing. In her experience, there were always willing boys.” (Gulp!) She chooses Derek, the school football team’s quarterback, to help with the house’s renovations. Soon, Derek and his younger cousin, Jack, are spending all their spare time at the house by the lake. The lake where Abbie swims...and hunts...and feeds.

What is the power the lake seems to exude? Why is Abbie drawn to it? And why can’t her feet fit into her shoes anymore? And what are those slits that have appeared in the ridges of her rib cage?

“The Lake” was originally published as part of a horror anthology edited by Christopher Golden called The Monster’s Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes. All of the stories in the book are told from the point-of-view of the monster. It’s this perspective that makes reading Due’s short story so powerful and deeply uneasy. Abbie LaFleur is a sexual predator. Why did she leave her previous job? It’s never stated explicitly. Were there whispers of her illicit dalliances up north? The reader doesn’t know for sure. The lake, however, seems to recognize a predator when it sees one, and Abbie is drawn into its waters to be reformed and rebaptized. It’s a chilling metamorphosis.

Tananarive Due was born in 1966 in Tallahassee, Florida. She is the oldest of three daughters of civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due and civil rights lawyer John D. Du, Jr. In 1995, while working as a journalist and columnist for the Miami Herald, Due wrote her first book, The Between, the story of a man diagnosed with schizophrenia whose break with reality may have a more cosmic and terrifying explanation. She has since gone on to write historical fiction, mysteries, and tales of the supernatural. Due is also part of the affiliate faculty in the creative writing MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles, holds an endowed chair in the humanities at Spelman College in Atlanta, and developed a course at UCLA called “The Sunken Place: Racism, Survival And The Black Horror Aesthetic.” You probably have also seen her appearances in such documentaries as Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror and The 101 Scariest Movie Moments of All Time (both on Shudder).

“The Lake” later made its way into a collection of Due’s called Ghost Summer: Stories. There, it linked up with other tales about Gracetown. The small Northern Florida town doesn’t have a great history, and like all repressed pasts, it comes back to haunt the present in terrible ways.

Ghost Summer: Stories and The Monster’s Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes should both be available at your local library. You can also listen to this reading courtesy of the Malden (MA) Public Library’s series “Campfire Ghost Stories.”

That’s all for today, campers. Remember to take only photos and leave only footprints...even if those footprints seem to have webbing between the toes. Be sure to extinguish all fires and clean up after yourselves, and...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

It is 12 October. There are 19 days until Halloween.

Let us continue our discussion from last Monday, shall we?

In that post, we looked at a few music videos from the 1980s that featured variations on the classic movie monsters of the 1930s – Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, The Wolf-Man, Jekyll & Hyde, etc.

That these monsters were considered to be still recognizable and prominent in the cultural memory that they could be used in a music video with little or no explanation of who or what they were is a topic for another time. (How many fifty-year-old cinematic characters and tropes are still active in today’s pop culture hive mind?) Let’s just say that the music video directors of the 1980s were part of the Monster Kid generation of the 1950s and 1960s, and so, the Universal Studio’s monster pantheon was like a second language to them. Younger viewers in the 1980s were also plugged into the monster zeitgeist thanks to Saturday and Sunday morning re-runs of Abbott & Costello Meet [enter name of monster here], late-night horror hosts, and comic books. It was a given that a shot of a man in evening clothes and a cape would be read as “Dracula.” I am not so sure that’s the case today.

Monsters, however, are not just what Carl Laemmle, Jr., saw fit to stick on the silver screen. They aren’t limited to what Jack Pierce was able to shape on Boris Karloff’s face with cotton and mortician’s wax. Let’s looks at those music videos that included monsters of different stripe…

…no, not that “Stripe.”

The video for Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” is a hodgepodge of slasher-era POV camerawork, weird sets, and unsettling creatures. At times, with the sudden appearance of a grisly face lit from below, it looks like outtakes from Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond. As with some of the other videos below, the limitations in quality of the video image really helps sell the creepiness. And the tune is pretty catchy. It must be pretty nice being the nephew of Barry Gordy, thus having access to Michael Jackson to do the back-up vocals on your song.

Before Billy Gibbons and co. jumped into their fire-engine red 1933 Ford coupe and drove around fixing the fashion sense of America’s young men like a bearded, Texan version of Queer Eye, ZZ Top donned MST3K-esque jumpsuits and sang about “TV Dinners.” Again, the poor quality of video adds to the weirdness factor in the video. It’s always nice to have stop-motion animated creatures a la Ray Harryhausen, too. I mean, what else could be under that foil before you toss it into the oven? Bonus points for keeping a Ouija board next to the refrigerator.

I’ll be honest, I never heard of Landscape, let alone saw this video on MTV, but a song called “Norman Bates” from an album entitled From the Tea-Rooms of Mars…to the Hell-holes of Uranus has got to be included here. The video has the mash-up feel of Psycho meets Carnival of Souls meets The Old Dark House. And it’s in lovely black-and-white.

Even The Rolling Stones jumped on the 80s horror bandwagon with their video for “Too Much Blood.” Any video that features shots from Basket Case and Female Trouble, Mick Jagger rapping about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Keith Richards wielding said chainsaw is gonna be an interesting watch/listen. I’ve never been much of a Stones fan, so I can’t judge the song, but the video is lots of fun.

Greg Kihn is one of us: he’s a monster kid. He’s got quite a few spooky novels under his belt. Horror Show was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for "Best First Novel." In 1982, he made one of the great horror music videos for his song “Jeopardy.” It’s filled with loads of weird imagery – the husband and wife connected by the fleshy appendage is just the tip of the marriage paranoia-fueled iceberg. Plus, at the end of the video, he hightails it from his wedding and picks up a woman sporting Shelly Duvall’s hairstyle from The Shining. Now that’s scary!

Here’s another video that I’d never seen before. Shame on me for not paying closer attention to Kate Bush during the 1980s. Or better yet, shame on MTV for not sticking this tune on heavy rotation. I probably wouldn’t have appreciated the references to Nigel Kneale’s sci-fi/horror scientist, Quatermass, seeing as I never saw Quatermass and the Pit until the late-90s, but the teenage me would have loved the “secret government sound experiments” storyline. The video for “Experiment IV” (a reference to the Saul Bass film Phase IV?) is incredibly British. So British that it serves tea during it’s running time. There are great cameos by Dawn French, Hugh Laurie, Richard Vernon, and Peter Vaughan. The Raiders of the Lost Ark-like reveal of the horrific monster behind the lovely, ethereal visage of Kate Bush is fantastic.