Does the dog die?

Back in 2002 I had the opportunity to work on a Big Movie. It was a buddy cop movie and two Big Stars attached, a big director coming off a very successful teen flick, and a friend of mine was hired to write the script. Lotta money on the line. I came on to consult.
We sat down in a hotel room and started writing dialogue. It was a great experience. Knowing that the lines we were writing would be coming out of the mouths of two of the most popular male actors in recent cinema history was a great thrill.
Early on we wrote a scene where the two cops were checking out some suspicious house. There’s a vicious dog barking in the background, threatening them. You hear a gunshot and the barking stops. We thought it would hilarious to have one of the guys actually shoot the dog. Just the thought of how clever and funny it would be kept us sailing forward through pages, scenes, conflicts. This would be the greatest buddy cop comedy ever.
We turned in some pages.
Two weeks later we got fired.
There was only one note.
“You shot the dog?”
“Well, yes,” we replied, “it’s the last thing anybody would expect, which is why it’s funny.”
Deaf ears.
We shot the dog.
And we say, “Thank you, God, for the lesson.”
Several years later, I was writing a novel called Eat the Dark for Del Rey books. In it, some very nasty things happen to a family trapped inside an old hospital. They have a young son, a five-year-old, is hiding from a supernatural killer in the dark. At one point, Erich Schoeneweiss, the Production Manager at Del Rey, asked, “Are you gonna kill the kid this time?” His point was, in most horror novels, the author never actually kills the kid. They put the kid in jeopardy, they use him as a kind of emotional hostage to keep the reader guessing, but when the rubber hits the road, the kid lives.
Not always, of course.
Stephen King has killed the kid a couple times, most notably in Cujo and Pet Sematary. In the latter case King pulled the particularly cruel stunt of killing the kid, then making us think that the kid wasn’t really dead, and then revealing that he indeed had killed the kid.
Imagine the hate mail. But I must tip my hat.
The theory being that, sooner or later, in one book or another, you have to kill the kid. Especially if, like King, you include children as characters in most of your work. Because at some point, the reader is going say, “Now wait a minute. This fellow is a piker. I’ve read his work before. He won’t really let this child die.” Because the reader relaxes. Because he is not an idiot.
And at that moment, as a writer, you lose a little bit of your soul.
But back to dogs.
I have killed them, from time to time. In an unpublished novel called Stillwater, I had one get eaten by a bull shark in a lake up in Maine. The dog in question belonged to the bad guy, but still, it was a dog, and I hated to see it go. I like dogs, you see. I like children too.
And perhaps one day I’ll get up the gumption to kill one of them.
Being a parent doesn’t help. I can’t even read a book like Cujo nowadays, not even the part where the little boy and his mother aren’t trapped in the Pinto, dying of dehydration. I can’t even read the part about the monster words, the incantation that the boy’s father hangs on his wall to keep the evil things in his closet at bay. It turns me to jelly. I had no problem with the book when I first read it back in high school, but it’s emotional kryptonite to me now.
So does being a parent make you a worse horror writer?
No, I don’t think so. But only a fool would argue that it doesn’t change you. The paradox that I’ve discovered is that, while having kids in real life makes it infinitely harder to kill them on paper, it also makes it much easier to imagine and describe in detail the anxieties and outright dreads of their parents. One becomes so fluent in limning these parental phobias, exploiting them to maximum effect, that the urge to do so is almost irresistible.
And again, the writer who relies on these tricks puts his soul at hazard. He becomes like the impotent lover who, upon finding his noodle resignedly limp, redirects all his energies on becoming the world’s best kisser.
At first my short-term solution was to stop using children in my future work, until such time as I was able to actually finish one of them off.
Whether or not this will qualify as a step up in my development as a novelist, I have no idea. But I will tell you this–both Death Troopers and No Doors, No Windows have children and teenagers featured in them.
Does this mean I finally bit the bullet and did what was necessary?
Well. You’ll have to read for yourself and find out. Hopefully I made the right choice.
I’ve already killed the damn dog.