Poison for gnomes

Return to Oz and the aesthetics of fear

Kinda recently I listened to an episode of Morning Becomes Eclectic¹ in which the DJ played Sufjan Stevens and Angelo De Augustine’s “Back to Oz,” which was inspired by the 1985 film Return to Oz. When the DJ said she’d never even heard of there being a sequel to Wizard of Oz I immediately crumbled into dust, then looked to see if it was streaming anywhere.²

Because I remembered that movie, all right. I’d seen it so many times as a kid that, when I watched as an adult, entire scenes were line-for-line familiar. Yet in the intervening years I’d become unsure whether it was real or a childhood fever dream. Every creator has media properties that end up shaping our tastes and the way we make art, and sometimes we don’t even know how formative they are. Return to Oz is one of those for me. Not so much because of the plot structure or themes as the way it builds a constant sense of eeriness.

It’s downright gothic at the start. The setup is that Dorothy, recently returned from her adventure in Oz, won’t stop talking about it and can’t sleep at night. It’s freaking Auntie Em and Uncle Henry tf out, so Aunt Em takes her to see a quack with a rudimentary electroconvulsive therapy machine that will shock those disturbing memories right out of Dorothy’s adorable little head.³ The hospital where he works is, of course, a creepy old mansion.

The sense of dread in these scenes is immediate and palpable. We hear the screams of the patients this “doctor” has previously treated; we know the stakes. After a thunderstorm knocks out the power, Dorothy is rescued by a mysterious young girl. They make their escape in a lashing rainstorm, and a flood carries Dorothy back to Oz.

But it’s a very different Oz than the candy-colored Hollywood version we saw in the MGM film. Return to Oz, which came out 46 years after Wizard, hewed closer to L. Frank Baum’s vision (it’s based on two of the subsequent books, The Marvelous Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz). There is no singing. There are no Munchkins. Dorothy and Bellina (her now-talking chicken who has accompanied her from home instead of Toto) find themselves in an eerily deserted country.

Dorothy follows a torn-up Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City, which is in ruins. Everyone, including Dorothy’s friends the Cowardly Lion and the Tin Woodman, has been turned into statues. But Dorothy soon finds out she’s not alone.

These guys look and act like cocaine-addled club refugees from 1985 South Beach and have wheels instead of hands! What are they even going to do?? But it’s their very uncanniness that terrifies, and their aggression is a marked contrast to the euphoric welcome Dorothy experienced last time she came to Oz. She is alone in a hostile land, her previous comforts and allies gone.

All of this is scary enough, but there’s so much more nightmare fuel to come.

Return’s score and the sound and visual design are calibrated to unsettle the viewer. Barely-audible scraping violins and voices that echo in unexpected pitches. A ruined city that evokes the fall of Rome, containing a gilded palace that has been taken over by the corrupt. One of the few similarities between Return and the MGM film is the reusing of common elements between worlds, from actors playing characters in both places to visual and auditory elements. The Wheelers’ unoiled wheels echo the squeaking of the gurney that carries Dorothy to her near doom in the hospital; the girl who saves her turns out to be Ozma, the exiled ruler of Oz.

Of course, Dorothy and the strange new friends she makes win in the end. After saving the Emerald City she goes back to Kansas, where the creepy hospital has burned down (everyone was saved except for the villainous doctor who stayed to rescue his machines). Uncle Henry has finished rebuilding the Gales’ house after the tornado. Dorothy can sleep, though Ozma occasionally visits her in the mirror. Everything will be fine.

However, even as the film’s final scenes shift to a sunnier tone, the shadow of threat is not forgotten. Dark(er) Oz is a thing that’s been explored quite a bit since 1985, but Return specifically got at the fears of children, without delving into fantasy-world politics⁴ or featuring an all-grown-up Dorothy Gale. Its use of practical effects⁵ instead of CGI makes it more grounded, and it looks and sounds distinctive enough that it made a deep impression on me.

Horror isn’t logical, but draws on human instincts for danger. When I write a scene in which I want to evoke fear, it’s less about what happens than the mental pictures I’m creating and the sounds and connotations of the words I’m using. From my last book:

I sit frozen, the car growing colder. The strip lighting on the overhead canopy is a sickly greenish white, the old bulbs flickering. I can hear them buzzing through the window glass like the ghosts of summer cicadas. The light above me flares and flickers out. The next one over does the same, and the next, until I’m in darkness. The shadows feel hungry.

The main character, Mary, is literally just sitting in a car. She’s stranded and in danger, but nothing awful is happening to her right that second. Yet the language creates a sense of dread so that, when Mary reaches out to the person she trusts the least but is the only one who might help her, the reader doesn’t just understand why she does this, but feels why.

---

Author updates

By the time this newsletter sends I will have just returned from Bouchercon, which is one of the biggest conventions in North America for readers and writers of crime fiction. The con is in a different city every year, and this time it’s in Nashville! I’m stoked to eat hot chicken and tour Studio B, as well as hang out with author friends and meet some of my favorite writers.

Weird thing I am researching

As I pull together my submission package for my publisher for this next novel, I’m searching for comp titles, which are recent books that would appeal to my readers or occupy a similar space in the market (“comp” is short for “comparable”). These can be hard to come by for books like mine that don’t fit neatly into any one genre. If you know of any love stories (not necessarily romance but with a strong romantic thread) released in the last 5 years, featuring any sort of immortal or out-of-their-time characters, hit me up in the comments! I’m sort of looking for Time Traveler’s Wife vibes without the weird grooming overtones.

Reading

I’ve downloaded a bunch of books to my e-reader for the trip, including:

• A Beautiful, Terrible Thing by Jen Waite

• Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology

• Dreadful by Caitlin Rozakis

• Behind Her Lives by Briana Cole

• For One Night Only by Jessica James

I’m excited to dive into them all, but I’m a huge mood reader when reading for pleasure so I’m not sure which will hook me first!

Watching/listening

I have been riveted to the full archive of MTV’s 120 Minutes. For those who don’t remember watching music videos on MTV (another crumbling-into-dust moment for me) 120 Minutes was MTV’s “alternative” show and one of the few pre-internet ways to discover music outside the mainstream. One of my favorite things about music videos as an art form is how they can just run on vibes! No plot necessary!

It’s fascinating to start at the very beginning and watch the progression from obscure (to me) ‘80s bands to music I remember loving (and hating) in the ‘90s and aughts. It’s truly wild how low-budget and chaotic some of these videos were and yet they played on national cable television! Whereas I feel unqualified to have a TikTok presence because the production values are just too high these days! 

Some of the highlights so far (I’m still at about 1987):

Top notch acting from these punks

Robert Smith has a reputation as having been constantly down in the dumps, but he’s actually quite silly

Almost 2 minutes of uncanny-valley-yet-boring then BAM! body horror

Cold War Vibes But Make it Weird is one of my favorite genres of music video from the eighties. Obsessed with their coats

---

If you enjoy my ramblings, you might like my books!

The Other Me, which PopSugar called a “Black Mirror-esque rabbit hole,” is an inventive page-turner about the choices we make and the ones made for us.

When I’m Her asks the question: How far would you go to get even with the woman who ruined your life?

1. I cannot recommend KCRW internet radio enough if you want to discover new music but are, like me, lazy about it! AND they have human DJs (fancy).

2. It is! Disney+.

3. Fairuza Balk radiates earnest goodness in this movie, which only highlights her range!

4. During my “research” for this newsletter I did come across an interpretation that the Nome King’s taking back of the emeralds and turning everyone into objects is reparations for Oz-ite imperialism…which, fair!

5. It came out during a time when fantasy movies were big into puppetry, so if you’ve seen Labyrinth or The Dark Crystal the look and feel will be familiar.