Analyzing Loren Eiseley’s “The Dance of the Frogs” as Horror

Real horror is subtle. It seduces.

One of the finest pieces of horror I’ve encountered is Loren Eiseley’s “The Dance of the Frogs“. I doubt Eiseley wrote this intending it to be horror. If he did, I have to find more horror writing by him (consider “The Fifth Planet“. Not quite horror but damn close). It is brilliant.

Horror done well is subtle. Horror can’t wack you over the head. It has to seduce you. It has to sneak up on you, entrap you. Horror, done well, must take you from comfort and peace to helplessness and inevitability.

Horror done well allows you no sure escape. Questions regarding safety, yes, freedom from worry, no. The original 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers movie (with the original ending and based on the Jack Finney novel, The Body Snatchers) is an excellent example of horror. Horrific things do not make good horror, horrifying situations make good horror.

Horror drops clues that nastiness is coming. It gives you a chance to escape while drawing you in an inch at a time. The creature that kills you unexpectedly and without warning isn’t horrifying. Finalizing, maybe, but not horrifying. It’s too quick, too final and you don’t suffer.

The monster that pursues you relentlessly, that is unstoppable yet always just too far away to get its decaying hands or tentacles or whatever around you, that constantly wants to deal you a deathblow and gets closer and closer without delivering that final stroke (remember the T-Rex chasing the buggy in Jurassic Park?). What makes it horrifying is the growing sense your situation is hopeless, that powers beyond your control have singled you out for some nastiness and yielding to the inevitable might be a good thing because then if would be over and you could rest.

Pure horror comes from within, from our natures, when we succumb to our lesser instincts and desires and reason is kicked out. Horror is when we willingly journey into the dark, lose our way and can’t make it back. Don’t believe that Aztec curse is real? Take the gold and find out. Don’t believe in magic potions? Take a drink and see. Horror leaves the door of escape open until you’ve wandered too far to use it. Horror lets you see it’s still there, still open, just useless to you because you didn’t believe, didn’t think, your ego or vanity grew out of control.

Real horror is when you’ve got no one but yourself to blame. Stephen King’s The Crate isn’t a horror story (except, perhaps, to Wilma), it’s a story of friendship with some horrifying things happening along the way. Or if it is a horror story, is about the horror of being in a bad relationship and not knowing how to get out.

Real horror is rare and when you find it, relish and rejoice in it.

Eiseley the author
Eiseley isn’t known as a fiction writer. Many call him “a modern Thoreau”. I read “The Dance of the Frogs” in The Star Thrower, a posthumous collection of his work. Somewhere around a third of the way through the book I considered giving it up. Eiseley may have been an outstanding scientist, naturalist, a modern contemplative, et cetera, and the first part of the book bored me. His style was too contemplative. I kept on thinking “Come on. Make a decision or reach a conclusion.”

Something kept me going (thank god for those inner voices). “The Dance of the Frogs” caught me completely off guard. I finished the story before I recognized how chilled I was, what a sense of terror, horror, it gave me. Some of that is because I wasn’t prepared for a horror story (I still don’t know if he meant it as one). I’ve read it twice in two days and will read it again, I’m sure.

I started analyzing it a few nights back, wanting to learn how this naturalist writer could draw me in so gently then turn me so completely. Note than an analysis isn’t a critique. I’m doing this for my benefit. I’m sharing it because 1) sharing is something I do and 2) others may benefit from this exegesis.

The complete Eiseley’s The Dance of the Frogs can be found at Altruistic World Online Library. I analyze the first three paragraphs here to give readers an idea of the study involved (remember, real horror is subtle. Read close to get everything that’s there). I hope you find it useful. Definitely hope you read The Dance of the Frogs to the end.

Eiseley’s writing is in normal text, my analysis is in [[bracketed red text]].

<The Dance of the Frogs>

He was a member of the Explorers Club [[The main character of the piece isn’t the narrator, it’s an unnamed “He”, and “was” places us firmly in the narrator’s memory, his past. The “Explorer’s Club” adds more mystery, a dabbling in some kind of unknown. We haven’t finished the first sentence and we’re already called into the mythic]], and he had never been outside the state of Pennsylvania [[A contradiction, the mythic meets the sensory, hence we’re in some kind of Borderland between the real and the unreal. The two pieces of the first sentence put together and you’ve set the reader up for some kind of conflict; modern – Pennsylvania – meets ancient – Explorer’s Club.]]. Some of us who were world travelers used to smile a little about that [[What started as an atmosphere contradiction becomes a personal conflict]], even though we knew his scientific reputation had been, at one time, great [[Conflict increases. The narrator’s distancing himself from the main character in time and space, also in age, education and accomplishments/achievements. The narrator’s attitude is one of indulgence.]]. It is always the way of youth to smile. I used to think of myself as something of an adventurer [[The narrator’s preparing us for something revelatory by self-deprecation]], but the time came when I realized that old Albert Dreyer, huddling[[excellent word. Has the connotation of something hidden or hiding]] with his drink in the shadows[[ditto]] close to the fire[[use of primal imagery]], had journeyed[[another excellent word. It’s older and has a mythic aspect. People travel to go somewhere, people journey to find or learn something.]] farther[[excellent word choice]] into the Country of Terror[[This is the money phrase. It clinches all the emotional energy/nuance preceding it]] than any of us would ever go[[The narrator states that he/we, who thought himself/ourselves bright and full of adventure, are nothing compared to the main character and their exploits]], God willing, and emerge alive[[ditto]].

He was a morose and aging man, without family and without intimates [[creation of distance between narrator and main character]]. His membership in the club dated back[[another call to the mythic, the ancient, to antiquity]] into the decades when he was a zoologist famous for his remarkable experiments[[Put all this together and you have the lunatic scientist who’s discovered something remarkable that’s turned him mad]] upon amphibians — he had recovered and actually produced the adult stage of the Mexican axolotl[[the specificity is brilliant because it’s exotic, unknown to most readers yet adds validity, plausibility]], as well as achieving remarkable tissue transplants[[excellent foreshadowing and again, just beyond the average reader’s experience and ken]] in salamanders. The club had been flattered to have him then, travel or no travel, but the end was not fortunate[[nice hinting, foreshadowing leading]]. The brilliant scientist had become the misanthrope; the achievement lay all in the past, and Albert Dreyer kept to his solitary room, his solitary drink, and his accustomed spot by the fire[[After all the praising we come back to that distance between the narrator and the main character. We also have the addition of “solitary”, perhaps a hint to some secret the main character has]].

The reason I came to hear his story was an odd one[[“odd”, an uncomfortable word]]. I had been north that year, and the club had asked me to give a little talk on the religious beliefs of the Indians of the northern forest[[religious, Indians: more hints to mythic]], the Naskapi of Labrador. I had long been a student of the strange melange of superstition[[ditto]] and woodland wisdom[[nice juxtaposition: superstition v wisdom. “They know something we don’t”]] that makes up the religious life of the nature peoples[[“nature peoples”: they’re not like us]]. Moreover, I had come to know something of the strange similarities of the ‘shaking tent rite” to the phenomena of the modern medium’s cabinet[[The introduction of something alien, the “shaking tent rite” and linking it to something recognized as a fraud, the “modern medium’s cabinet”]].

You can find other readers’ reactions to “The Dance of the Frogs” on phoenixbookreview and artbrulant.

I
He was a member of the Explorers Club, and he had never been outside the state of Pennsylvania. Some of us who were world travelers used to smile a little about that, even though we knew his scientific reputation had been, at one time, great. It is always the way of youth to smile. I used to think of myself as something of an adventurer, but the time came when I realized that old Albert Dreyer, huddling with his drink in the shadows close to the fire, had journeyed farther into the Country of Terror than any of us would ever go, God willing, and emerge alive.

He was a morose and aging man, without family and without intimates. His membership in the club dated back into the decades when he was a zoologist famous for his remarkable experiments upon amphibians — he had recovered and actually produced the adult stage of the Mexican axolotl, as well as achieving remarkab1e tissue transplants in salamanders. The club had been flattered to have him then, travel or no travel, but the end was not fortunate. The brilliant scientist had become the misanthrope; the achievement lay all in the past, and Albert Dreyer kept to his solitary room, his solitary drink, and his accustomed spot by the fire.

The reason I came to hear his story was an odd one. I had been north that year, and the club had asked me to give a little talk on the religious beliefs of the Indians of the northern forest, the Naskapi of Labrador. I had long been a student of the strange melange of superstition and woodland wisdom that makes up the religious life of the nature peoples. Moreover, I had come to know something of the strange similarities of the ‘shaking tent rite” to the phenomena of the modern medium’s cabinet.

“The special tent with its entranced occupant is no different from the cabinet,” I contended … The only difference is the type of voices that emerge. Many of the physical phenomena are identical — the movement of powerful forces shaking the conical hut, objects thrown, all this is familiar to Western psychical science. What is different are the voices projected. Here they are the cries of animals, the voices from the swamp and the mountain — the solitary elementals before whom the primitive man stands in awe, and from whom he begs sustenance. Here the game lords reign supreme; man himself is voiceless.”

A low, halting query reached me from the back of the room. I was startled, even in the midst of my discussion, to note that it was Dreyer.

“And the game lords, what are they?”

“Each species of animal is supposed to have gigantic leaders of more than normal size,” I explained. “These beings are the immaterial controllers of that particular type of animal. Legend about them is confused. Sometimes they partake of human qualities, will and intelligence, but they are of animal shape. They control the movements of game, and thus their favor may mean life or death to man.”

“Are they visible?” Again Dreyer’s low, troubled voice came from the back of the room.

“Native belief has it that they can be seen on rare occasions,” I answered. “In a sense they remind one of the concept of the archetypes, the originals behind the petty show of our small, transitory existence. They are the immortal renewers of substance — the force behind and above animate nature.”

“Do they dance?” persisted Dreyer.

At this I grew nettled. Old Dreyer in a heckling mood was something new. “I cannot answer that question,” I said acidly … “My informants failed to elaborate upon it. But they believe implicitly in these monstrous beings, talk to and propitiate them. It is their voices that emerge from the shaking tent.”

“The Indians believe it,” pursued old Dreyer relentlessly, “but do you believe it?”

“My dear fellow — I shrugged and glanced at the smiling audience — “I have seen many strange things, many puzzling things, but I am a scientist.” Dreyer made a contemptuous sound in his throat and went back to the shadow out of which he had crept in his interest. The talk was over. I headed for the bar.

II
The evening passed. Men drifted homeward or went to their rooms. I had been a year in the woods and hungered for voices and companionship. Finally, however, I sat alone with my glass, a little mellow, perhaps, enjoying the warmth of the fire and remembering the blue snowfields of the North as they should be remembered — in the comfort of warm rooms.

I think an hour must have passed. The club was silent except for the ticking of an antiquated clock on the mantel and small night noises from the street. I must have drowsed. At all events it was some time before I grew aware that a chair had been drawn up opposite me. I started.

“A damp night,” I said.

“Foggy,” said the man in the shadow musingly. “But not too foggy. They like it that way.”

“Eh?” I said. I knew immediately it was Dreyer speaking. Maybe I had missed something; on second thought, maybe not.

“And spring,” he said. “Spring. That’s part of it. God knows why, of course, but we feel it, why shouldn’t they? And more intensely.”

“Look –” I said. “I guess –” The old man was more human than I thought. He reached out and touched my knee with the hand that he always kept a glove over — burn, we used to speculate — and smiled softly.

“You don’t know what I’m talking about,” he finished for me … And, besides, I ruffled your feelings earlier in the evening. You must forgive me. You touched on an interest of mine, and I was perhaps overeager. I did not intend to give the appearance of heckling. It was only that …”

“Of course,” I said. “Of course.” Such a confession from Dreyer was astounding. The man might be ill. I rang for a drink and decided to shift the conversation to a safer topic, more appropriate to a scholar.

“Frogs,” I said desperately, like any young ass in a china shop. “Always admired your experiments. Frogs. Yes.”

I give the old man credit. He took the drink and held it up and looked at me across the rim. There was a faint stir of sardonic humor in his eyes.

“Frogs, no,” he said, “or maybe yes. I’ve never been quite sure. Maybe yes. But there was no time to decide properly.” The humor faded out of his eyes. “Maybe I should have let go,” he said. “It was what they wanted. There’s no doubting that at all, but it came too quick for me. What would you have done?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly enough and pinched myself.

“You had better know,” said Albert Dreyer severely, “if you’re planning to become an investigator of primitive religions. Or even not. I wasn’t, you know, and the things came to me just when I least suspected — But I forget, you don’t believe in them.”

He shrugged and half rose, and for the first time, really, I saw the black-gloved hand and the haunted face of Albert Dreyer and knew in my heart the things he had stood for in science. I got up then, as a young man in the presence of his betters should get up, and I said, and I meant it, every word: “Please, Dr. Dreyer, sit down and tell me. I’m too young to be saying what I believe or don’t believe in at all. I’d be obliged if you’d tell me.”

Just at that moment a strange, wonderful dignity shone out of the countenance of Albert Dreyer, and I knew the man he was. He bowed and sat down, and there were no longer the barriers of age and youthful ego between us. There were just two men under a lamp, and around them a great waiting silence. Out to the ends of the universe, I thought fleetingly, that’s the way with man and his lamps. One has to huddle in, there’s so little light and so much space. One —

III
“It could happen to anyone,” said Albert Dreyer. “And especially in the spring. Remember that. And all I did was to skip. Just a few feet, mark you, but I skipped. Remember that, too.

“You wouldn’t remember the place at all. At least not as it was then.” He paused and shook the ice in his glass and spoke more easily.

“It was a road that came out finally in a marsh along the Schuykill River. Probably all industrial now. But I had a little house out there with a laboratory thrown in. It was convenient to the marsh, and that helped me with my studies of amphibia. Moreover, it was a wild, lonely road, and I wanted solitude. It is always the demand of the naturalist. You understand that?”

“Of course,” I said. I knew he had gone there, after the death of his young wife, in grief and loneliness and despair. He was not a man to mention such things. “It is best for the naturalist,” I agreed.

“Exactly. My best work was done there.” He held up his black-gloved hand and glanced at it meditatively. “The work on the axolotl, newt neoteny. I worked hard. I had –” he hesitated — “things to forget. There were times when I worked all night. Or diverted myself, while waiting the result of an experiment, by midnight walks. It was a strange road. Wild all right, but paved and close enough to the city that there were occasional street lamps. All uphill and downhill, with bits of forest leaning in over it, till you walked in a tunnel of trees. Then suddenly you were in the marsh, and the road ended at an old, unused wharf.

“A place to be alone. A place to walk and think. A place for shadows to stretch ahead of you from one dim lamp to another and spring back as you reached the next. I have seen them get tall, tall, but never like that night. It was like a road into space.”

“Cold?” I asked.

“No. I shouldn’t have said ‘space.’ It gives the wrong effect. Not cold. Spring. Frog time. The first warmth, and the leaves coming. A little fog in the hollows. The way they like it then in the wet leaves and bogs. No moon, though; secretive and dark, with just those street lamps wandered out from the town. I often wondered what graft had brought them there. They shone on nothing — except my walks at midnight and the journeys of toads, but still …”

“Yes?” I prompted, as he paused.

“I was just thinking. The web of things. A politician in town gets a rake-off for selling useless lights on a useless road. If it hadn’t been for that, I might not have seen them. I might not even have skipped. Or, if I had, the effect — How can you tell about such things afterwards? Was the effect heightened? Did it magnify their power? Who is to say?”

“The skip?” I said, trying to keep things casual. “I don’t understand. You mean, just skipping? Jumping?”

Something like a twinkle came into his eyes for a moment. “Just that,” he said. “No more. You are a young man. Impulsive? You should understand.”

“I’m afraid –” I began to counter.

“But of course,” he cried pleasantly. “I forget. You were not there. So how could I expect you to feel or know about this skipping. Look, look at me now. A sober man, eh?”

I nodded. “Dignified,” I said cautiously.

“Very well. But, young man, there is a time to skip. On country roads in the spring. It is not necessary that there be girls. You will skip without them. You will skip because something within you knows the time — frog time. Then you will skip.”

“Then I will skip,” I repeated, hypnotized. Mad or not, there was a force in Albert Dreyer. Even there under the club lights, the night damp of an unused road began to gather.

IV
“It was a late spring,” he said. “Fog and mist in those hollows in a way I had never seen before. And frogs, of course. Thousands of them, and twenty species, trilling, gurgling, and grunting in as many keys. The beautiful keen silver piping of spring peepers arousing as the last ice leaves the ponds — if you have heard that after a long winter alone, you will never forget it.” He paused and leaned forward, listening with such an intent inner ear that one could almost hear that far-off silver piping from the wet meadows of the man’s forgotten years.

I rattled my glass uneasily, and his eyes came back to me.

“They come out then,” he said more calmly. “All amphibia have to return to the water for mating and egg laying. Even toads will hop miles across country to streams and waterways. You don’t see them unless you go out at night in the right places as I did, but that night —

“Well, it was unusual, put it that way, as an understatement. It was late, and the creatures seemed to know it. You could feel the forces of mighty and archaic life welling up from the very ground. The water was pulling them — not water as we know it, but the mother, the ancient life force, the thing that made us in the days of creation, and that lurks around us still, unnoticed in our sterile cities.

“I was no different from any other young fool coming home on a spring night, except that as a student of life, and of amphibia in particular, I was, shall we say, more aware of the creatures. I had performed experiments” — the black glove gestured before my eyes. “I was, as it proved, susceptible.

“It began on that lost stretch of roadway leading to the river, and it began simply enough. All around, under the street lamps, I saw little frogs and big frogs hopping steadily toward the river. They were going in my direction.

“At that time I had my whimsies, and I was spry enough to feel the tug of that great movement. I joined them. There was no mystery about it. I simply began to skip, to skip gaily, and enjoy the great bobbing shadow I created as I passed onward with that leaping host all headed for the river.

“Now skipping along a wet pavement in spring is infectious, particularly going downhill, as we were. The impulse to take mightier leaps, to soar farther, increases progressively. The madness worked into me. I bounded till my lungs labored, and my shadow, at first my own shadow, bounded and labored with me.

“It was only midway in my flight that I began to grow conscious that I was not alone. The feeling was not strong at first. Normally a sober pedestrian, I was ecstatically preoccupied with the discovery of latent stores of energy and agility which I had not suspected in my subdued existence.

“It was only as we passed under a street lamp that I noticed, beside my own bobbing shadow, another great, leaping grotesquerie that had an uncanny suggestion of the frog world about it. The shocking aspect of the thing lay in its size, and the fact that, judging from the shadow, it was soaring higher and more gaily than myself.

“‘Very well,’ you will say” — and here Dreyer paused and looked at me tolerantly — “‘Why didn’t you turn around? That would be the scientific thing to do.'”

“It would be the scientific thing to do, young man, but let me tell you it is not done — not on an empty road at midnight — not when the shadow is already beside your shadow and is joined by another, and then another.

“No, you do not pause. You look neither to left nor right, for fear of what you might see there. Instead, you dance on madly, hopelessly. Plunging higher, higher, in the hope the shadows will be left behind, or prove to be only leaves dancing, when you reach the next street light. Or that whatever had joined you in this midnight bacchanal will take some other pathway and depart.

“You do not look — you cannot look — because to do so is to destroy the universe in which we move and exist and have our transient being. You dare not look, because, beside the shadows, there now comes to your ears the loose-limbed slap of giant batrachian feet, not loud, not loud at all, but there, definitely there, behind you at your shoulder, plunging with the utter madness of spring, their rhythm entering your bones until you too are hurtling upward in some gigantic ecstasy that it is not given to mere flesh and blood to long endure.

“I was part of it, part of some mad dance of the elementals behind the show of things. Perhaps in that night of archaic and elemental passion, that festival of the wetlands, my careless hopping passage under the street lights had called them, attracted their attention, brought them leaping down some fourth-dimensional roadway into the world of time.

“Do not suppose for a single moment I thought so coherently then. My lungs were bursting, my physical self exhausted, but I sprang, I hurtled, I flung myself onward in a company I could not see, that never outpaced me, but that swept me with the mighty ecstasies of a thousand springs, and that bore me onward exultantly past my own doorstep, toward the river, toward some pathway long forgotten, toward some unforgettable destination in the wetlands and the spring.

“Even as I leaped, I was changing. It was this, I think, that stirred the last remnants of human fear and human caution that I still possessed. My will was in abeyance; I could not stop. Furthermore, certain sensations, hypnotic or otherwise, suggested to me that my own physical shape was modifying, or about to change. I was leaping with a growing ease. I was —

“It was just then that the wharf lights began to show. We were approaching the end of the road, and the road, as I have said, ended in the river. It was this, I suppose, that startled me back into some semblance of human terror. Man is a land animal. He does not willingly plunge off wharfs at midnight in the monstrous company of amphibious shadows.

“Nevertheless their power held me. We pounded madly toward the wharf, and under the light that hung above it, and the beam that made a cross. Part of me struggled to stop, and part of me hurtled on. But in that final frenzy of terror before the water below engulfed me I shrieked, ‘Help! In the name of God, help me! In the name of Jesus, stop!'”

Dreyer paused and drew in his chair a little closer under the light. Then he went on steadily.

“I was not, I suppose, a particularly religious man, and the cries merely revealed the extremity of my terror. Nevertheless this is a strange thing, and whether it involves the crossed beam, or the appeal to a Christian deity, I will not attempt to answer.

“In one electric instant, however, I was free. It was like the release from demoniac possession. One moment I was leaping in an inhuman company of elder things, and the next moment I was a badly shaken human being on a wharf. Strangest of all, perhaps, was the sudden silence of that midnight hour. I looked down in the circle of the arc light, and there by my feet hopped feebly some tiny froglets of the great migration. There was nothing impressive about them, but you will understand that I drew back in revulsion. I have never been able to handle them for research since. My work is in the past.”

He paused and drank, and then, seeing perhaps some lingering doubt and confusion in my eyes, held up his black-gloved hand and deliberately pinched off the glove.

A man should not do that to another man without warning, but I suppose he felt I demanded some proof. I turned my eyes away. One does not like a webbed batrachian hand on a human being.

As I rose embarrassedly, his voice came up to me from the depths of the chair.

“It is not the hand,” Dreyer said. “It is the question of choice. Perhaps I was a coward, and ill prepared. Perhaps” — his voice searched uneasily among his memories — “perhaps I should have taken them and that springtime without question. Perhaps I should have trusted them and hopped onward. Who knows? They were gay enough, at least.”

He sighed and set down his glass and stared so intently into empty space that, seeing I was forgotten, I tiptoed quietly away.