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The Biblical book of Iov (Job) ultimately teaches one primary lesson. This is that there are some things we cannot understand simply because we lack the perspective to interpret them. It is for this reason that our Sages decided to include this book in the Canon, for there was, even then, a general agreement that the events portrayed never really happened. Iov is the only work in Tanach that really falls into the category of philosophy, rather than law, prophecy, or history.

For one who writes horror stories, this impossibility of knowing everything is an important point. What is good or evil is mostly subjective, determined by how a given action or event affects us on a personal level. There is nothing evil about Crichton's veloceraptors, when you look at them from the dinosaurs' point of view, but it certainly seems evil to the people they're eating, or attempting to eat. The dinosaurs look at things from their own perspective and, from that perspective, the people are simply food.

In the same way, something that seems bad may not be. How much better might the world have been if Hitler, y.s., had died as an infant? But, if he had, who would know how much that death had benefited the world? God, certainly, but it's doubtful any person would know. It would merely have been the sad, regrettable death of an innocent baby to anyone who even heard of it.

Here we have a basic dilemma. We know what happened, but we really don't know what didn't happen. True, we can make projections that will be accurate within the given parameters. If we turn down Oak Street, it is obvious that we didn't turn down Elm Street two blocks further on. What isn't obvious—what, in fact, will probably never be known—is that taking this particular turn meant we didn't die after being hit by the car running the red light on the next block.

Cause and effect, likewise, is not always obvious. The old tale of the war that started because a butcher's wife burnt his toast one morning is an example. We think that wars are caused by great events, but they may just as easily have their origin in something utterly insignificant that escalates through several people until reaching the king.

Thus, in this story, the butcher is grumpy because of the burnt toast. He takes his ire out on his first customer of the day, who happens to be the king's cook. The cook, fuming about her ill-treatment from the butcher, ends up neglecting what she's doing and produces a truly awful meal. The king, his stomach heaving from the badly cooked food, is confronted by the ambassador of the neighboring kingdom, who has a minor complaint about some sheep grazing on the wrong side of the border and damaging a meadow. By now in a terrible mood, the king tells the ambassador in rather undiplomatic language what he can do with the sheep and, when the ambassador reports back to his own king, a war begins and thousands are killed.

All those deaths, and for no reason more significant than burnt toast. And, if the butcher's wife is ultimately to blame, she slept quite well, thank you, since she never knew it. Only the end result is seen. No one see the full chain of causative events.

This sort of thing is important in writing fiction. Sure, you can do the whole thing from the hero's viewpoint, and even produce a good story. Many have done just that. But it's much more interesting to get into the villain's thought processes as well. There is a reason actors love to play the bad guy. He's usually a lot more interesting.

Take the classical vampire. Here is a generally uncomplicated character, one whose sole motivation appears to be hunger. But this needs to be developed and explored. Why does he drink blood? The obvious answer, of course, is that blood is the only thing that will provide nourishment for a vampire.

So how does he look at himself? Is he fully reconciled to killing other people in order to survive? Does he feel any guilt? Does he even kill? Or does he simply take enough to satisfy his hunger and leave his victim little worse off than a blood donor at the Red Cross? Do we have the angst of a Nick Knight, or the uncaring sense of superiority of a Le Croix? (In many ways, to be honest, the more interesting character.)

All experience is subjective. The Sages asked if it was proper for a man to hold that the world was created only for his personal benefit, and they decided that it was, at least in the sense that, if he was not in it, it wouldn't exist for him. We have to be here to experience life. We may claim to look at things objectively, to make decisions based on how they will affect the greatest number of people, but at its core each decision will still be based on how it will personally affect the one making it.

Likewise, we experience all of life subjectively. How can we do otherwise? We can empathize with others, but only our own life directly impacts our existence.

Religion, mostly, teaches that we have free will. We make our decisions for good or ill, right or wrong. True, we are taught from an early age to make the right decisions, the good decisions. Yet, learning aside, we still have to make them ourselves. We cannot say that whatever happens is fate, and there is nothing we can do to change it. Whatever we do, we do because we have made a conscious choice to do so.

Now, some will say that free will is incompatible with an omniscient God. If God knows everything that will happen, it logically follows that our actions are pre-ordained. Such, indeed, is the Islamic position, holding that the very concept of free will diminishes the omniscience of God. Personally, I fail to see this. After all, the possession of free will, the ability to choose between right and wrong, good and evil, is precisely what is meant when the Torah says that man was created "in the image of God."

So how can God be omniscient and still allow free will? God does, indeed, know the future. But since each human decision creates a different future to some extent, it follows that God knows all possible futures and, for the sake of man's progress, leaves it up to humanity which of these will come to pass. An essential element in free will is that God deliberately declines to know the exact, precise future. If it were otherwise, then instead of man's natural position as God's partner in the completion of creation, man would be nothing more than a puppet, manipulated for the entertainment of an essentially uncaring deity.

The classical pagan gods worked in exactly this way. Man was a toy, and wars would be fought because one god or goddess thought it might be amusing, or felt insulted by something a human had done. Fate plays a major role in Greek drama and literature. Oedipus kills his father, sleeps with his mother, and blinds himself because those actions were pre-ordained, and his father's attempt to kill him as an infant had failed.

One problem with fate as a literary device, of course, is that it tends to make things a bit predictable. The reader wants to be caught up in the story, to be able to not only suffer along with the protagonist, but to feel his hopes and dreams. We don't really like inevitability. Even when we know the end, we still want to feel that these particular individuals will make out okay.

In Titanic, even though it's pretty obvious that the ship is going to sink, writer/director James Cameron was smart enough to hold out hope for the two young lovers until the very end. The greater event was personalized, given a subjective viewpoint through them. True, he might have come up with a better way to do so than a sleazy artist and a rather slutty girl, but it evidently worked, considering how many people went to see the movie.

So it is with good and evil. What is good for the individual may not always be good for the group, and will be perceived differently as a result. Looking back at our vampire analogy, what is good for the vampire will probably be seen as a terrible evil by his victims and their families, or by society as a whole.

It is even possible, if we presume the classical "one bite and you're doomed" concept of the spread of vampirism, that the vampire himself would eventually have problems with what he's doing. At some point there will be more vampires than available victims. (Which, presumably, is why most modern vampire writers make the condition something that is passed on only when the vampire desires to bring his victim over, and not as an inevitable consequence of an attack.)

This brings us back to our inital premise. There are some things we simply cannot understand, not because they are by definition unfathomable, but because we lack the perspective to comprehend and assess them. We can only see from our own perspective. And we cannot presume that our perspective is the only one, or that it is the correct one.

When I wrote The Alukam, I deliberately shifted the viewpoint from character to character, so that what happened was seen from multiple perspectives. The detective is trying to solve a crime, seeking to remove a perceived evil from his community. The murderer, on the other hand, sees nothing particularly evil in what he's doing, for his "crimes" are inherent in his nature. The victims have another viewpoint, of course.

It's all, as I said, quite subjective.

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