And that raises a conundrum. Call it the Jack Bauer paradox, and unless you’ve been living in a cave you’re probably aware that Jack Bauer is the lead character on the Fox television show 24. Jack is undoubtedly the hero, but he has done some questionable things during his race against the clock. The argument goes like this: We absolutely will not torture. Never, under any circumstances. Okay, fair enough. It’s a view most sane and moral people would agree to without reservation. Except…what if there was a nuclear bomb set to explode in the center of a densely populated city and one person, a terrorist, knew where it was. The clock is ticking and hundreds of thousands could die, but everyone could be saved if someone can get to the bomb in time. Every second matters. Would it be acceptable to torture the terrorist for the information so that all those lives could be spared?
Most people would pick up the pliers or wire the terrorist’s testicles to a car battery if it meant saving all those lives. If anyone insists they wouldn’t, put a polygraph cuff on them and tell them that their own family would die in the blast as well. Then ask if they wouldn’t cross that line.
This is what philosophers have labeled an “acceptable evil” or a “necessary evil.” Jack Bauer isn’t a bad guy, but the scriptwriters keep putting him in positions where there are no other doors left open and only “hard choices” are left. So…under those circumstances, what would Jack do?
What would you and I do? If it meant saving a hundred thousand orphans from being murdered, I think Mother Teresa would have gone medieval.
That’s necessary evil. No one has yet been able to come up with anything approaching an answer to this conundrum.
UNNECESSARY EVIL
Some evil acts can be labeled as temporary insanity or crimes of passion, and maybe they are. These labels cover everything from popping a cap in an unfaithful spouse to road rage.
Take that up a notch and you have multiple individuals committing antisocial or violent acts—mass hysteria, the mob mentality. Psychologists have made careers out of explaining and defending this kind of behavior. But when we turn the dial all the way up to ethnic genocide, can there possibly be an explanation or have we crossed the line from a momentary lapse of reason into true evil?
“Genocide” was coined by Raphael Lemkin during the Nuremberg Trials; it is the systematic and deliberate destruction of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group. It’s not a spur of the moment thing. It isn’t the end result of a frustrating screaming match or a riot over a soccer game. It’s cold and calculated. It’s a choice, and that makes it evil. We’ve seen it happen. The Srebrenica Massacre of July 1995 resulted in the slaughter of an estimated eight thousand Bosniak men and boys, an atrocity carried out during the Bosnian War by units of the Army of Republika Srpska under the command of General Ratko Mladi
These massacres were years in the making, as was the Nazi Final Solution and other campaigns of genocide. Not rash acts, but cold choices.
It makes you wonder why we look so hard for our evil to be of supernatural origin. We humans seem to be pretty talented at it without demonic help.
MONSTERS (AND THE PEOPLE WHO HUNT THEM)
However, the belief in supernatural evil persists. Exorcisms still occur. Hauntings are investigated. People wear charms against evil. Congregations pray for protection against unspecified harm.
It can be argued that the belief in monsters persists as much because of pop culture as because of ignorance. Possibly more so. Books, movies, comics, TV, video games, and all of the other forms of entertainment continue to showcase vampires, werewolves, vengeance ghosts, demons, dark gods, and other unnatural nasties.
Scaring the bejesus out of people is big business. If you’re reading this book you grasp that concept. You probably have horror movie DVDs at home, maybe some dog-eared Stephen King novels. Shows like Supernatural and Fringe are on your TiVo, and a lineup of American remakes of Japanese horror flicks are in your Netflix queue.
Go ahead…admit it. You like being scared.
Maybe…you even like to imagine what it would be like to be the monster. A lot more people empathize with Dracula than Van Helsing. The monsters are more fun.
Does Good Win or Does Evil Fail?
“In general, good survives in my books by holding to its principles…by believing in the things that I want to believe in, in my real life. Evil fails, when it fails (which, truthfully, is most of the time), by underestimating the good guys’ willingness to sacrifice their lives. Because that’s what heroes are: people who, without regard for their own safety, are willing to sacrifice themselves to save the day.”—Rachel Caine is a bestselling author.
In They Bite,4 authors Jonathan Maberry and David F. Kramer explored the darkness from the point of view of the monster, tracking the creatures from folklore and myth, through urban legend and into pop culture.
This companion book takes the other view by examining who (and sometimes what) stood against the coming of the darkness, who defended the helpless against the night predators, and who chased away the ghosts and exorcised the demons. We’re talking about the good guys, the heroes, the vampire hunters, exorcists, ghost hunters, priests, witch doctors, and other often unsung heroes in the never-ending battle between good and the darkest evil.
Grab a stake, polish your crucifix, load your pistol with silver bullets, and let’s go hunting.
2
HEROES AND VILLAINS
Scott Grimando, Dragon Slayer
“The Dragon Slayer was done for an Epic Poem I wrote for my book, The Art of the Mythical Woman, Lucid Dreams. The Hero sets out to prove her worth in battle donning the armor of her father who had no sons. Even the dragon underestimated her quickness and agility.”—Scott Grimando is an illustrator and conceptual artist.
HOLDING OUT FOR A HERO
We’ve always had heroes and villains. In the earliest days the hero was the caveman who throttled something and dragged it home for dinner. The villain was the brute in the next cave who throttled the hunter and stole the intended dinner.
From another view, the hero is God and the villain is the devil, and everyone who came afterward and embraced light or darkness are wannabes. To the ancient Greeks a hero was a kind of demigod, a half-breed offspring of a human and a god who was born with special powers or knowledge and who often had the support of a god. That’s not how we use the word today. By modern popular definition a hero is a person who shows courage when faced with a problem. This could be someone showing poise and determination during a fight against cancer or a soldier on a battlefield running to rescue a wounded comrade. Firemen entering a burning building are heroes. So are cops. A lot of people are heroic at different times in their lives, some more visibly than others. There is big, dramatic heroism and small, quiet heroism.
In storytelling, heroes tend to be a bit larger than life. They are the ones who stand up to threats that other people cannot face. Heroes slay dragons or hold a bridge against a horde of foes. Because of stories we tend to think of heroes as having big muscles, square jaws, and a will of iron.
But that’s a skewed view of heroism. If you’re big and tough, well trained and resourceful, then fighting the enemy is not that much of a stretch. If you’re small and weak and have no special training, standing up to danger is viewed as a much grander undertaking. This is, of course,