The Lemony Fresh Scent Of Pure Evil

So building maintenance has reloaded the "Let's hide the poopy smell" air freshener in the restroom at work. This is all fine and good, cuz there may be some truth in "everyone loves their own brand", but god(s) knows I don't wanna smell what your GI tract did to that Whataburger you scarfed down yesterday. Anyway - not meaning to branch off into scatology or anything... this deoderizr thingie exudes a smell that is supposed to be lemon. To cop a riff from Douglas Adams this stuff smells "almost, but not quite entirely unlike" lemon. But you know it's lemon-y because all the artificial lemon flavoring/scenting that we've been exposed to since the advent of "artificial colors and flavors".

So - being the lateral thinking kind of guy I am... I started thinking about stinks, and evil. The general conception is that bad things smell... well, bad. Horror stories (the kind I like to read) often use adjectives like "putrescent", "sepulchural", "open grave like", "rotten" et cetera when discussing the Damned Thing that is menacing society (yeah, I like's me some Lovecraft)... there's a few exceptions to this, but even those (I'm thinking of the virus in Peter Straub's Floating Dragon here) have an underlying hint of something nasty to them, like it might smell like lillies, but there's a tinge of decay in the scent or whatever. Or somehow the smell is overpowering and therefore goes out the backend of "pleasant smell" into the realm of "overload of scent" and therefore bad.

I'm thinking, rot and decay are part of the world, it's only natural. And granted that they still smell unpleasant, but they're still part of the circle of life and all that. So why should we associate these smells (of death) with things that are horrific?

Reading critical discussions of Horror (like Lovecraft's Supernatural Horror in Literature or King's Danse Macabre) both of these talk about what separates Horror from Terror. Terror is just fear turned up to 11. Horror is defined by things having a sense of "wrongness" to them. What made Frankenstein's creature so horrifying was that he was outside the natural order, being created and not born, and was as smart as a "nautral" man. An imperfect reflection of an already imperfect thing.

So - if we've got this sense of wrongness going on in "true" horror, as opposed to terror, then the kinds of scents monsters exude would be akin to the deoderizer smell in the men's room. Zombies shouldn't just smell like dead rotting meat, but rotting meat mixed with that grape flavoring that they use in grape bubble gum. Or vampires smell like strawberry quik. After all, these things are unnatural and outside the order of things... just like those artificial flavors.

For my money - the devil won't smell like sulfur and brimstone, he'll have the lemony scent going on, naturally. And hell will smell like the bathroom did. For all eternity.