green_dreams | Entries tagged with horror

Light stuff, this time. Piper's fallen asleep again (yay!), and I'm waiting for the vet to call back, just over a couple of questions. Poor girl.

Rewatching Cabin in the Woods[1] (and I think at this point I am rather past worrying about spoilers) and am just gonna say: this movie makes me so angry for Jules. First, what happened to her was horrible. Second, what the Institute-Company-whoeverthehell did to her was horrible. Third, dammit, every time I watch it I am reminded that from what you can see of who she was before she was bleached and roofied, she's the closest thing the group has to a Final Girl.

I'm not saying Dana should have died; honestly, if this movie wasn't the kind of thing to give me pause about any such kind of statement, I wouldn't like it as much as I do. I'm saying it annoys me even more because it points up how much Those Guys are willing to chew people up and spit them out without regard for who they are.

(And yet, yeah, I still feel for Gary and Steve and even Wendy and... Dammit.. I mean, I despise what they do, but I can understand them, and there is not as much disgust in the understanding as there could have been. --and I'm going to end this before I start trying to break down everything that movie makes me think about, because those rambles can get positively fractal.)

This is by no means the ~~worst~~ most upsetting or biggest effect of the movie, but dammit, it's one of them.

A/y. Yes. The finale is... making the screen very red, so I'm gonna go back to that, now. Back in a bit.
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[1] Hush, it's my birthday.

Current Mood: content

I noticed a certain common colouration in the books I had to hand:

Covers of /Lies and Ugliness/, /Bedlam/, /The Weird/, and /Breed/.

I'm cheating a bit with this picture, since both the hardback cover and the dustjacket of Breed are shown. (I took the dustjacket off because something about the paper just feels subtly repellant--some weird combination of sooty and greasy.) On the flipside, I'm not including The Rivals of Frankenstein, which continues the black-white-red theme, so it all balances if anyone's keeping score, which I sort of doubt.

Am mildly amused by this, especially since the other books I am reading, or have just finished, or have just started, have a black-and-white thing going for the covers. (Apparently the subtraction of red takes you from horror to crime, who knew? Although Bedlam is an exception to that.)

Not feeling well today; I'm hoping it's just after-effects of the flu shot, since those should clear up more quickly than anything I might have actually caught. Managed to get a little cleaning done, though, and get out of the house to pick up groceries and return library books. (Mildly annoyed that one of the books I have on hold has been in transit for just over a week, now, and is still not at the local branch. It's a Lovecraft collection, so I suspect I could find the contents on Gutenberg, but I find I really prefer physical copies of anthologies and collections. Screens and ereaders work best for single works, for me--novels or novellas or standalone short stories, any length is fine, just not several short stories.

Probably turning in early tonight; the nap after the vet's was nice, but I'm still wiped.

Current Mood: tired

John has made my day SIX BILLION times better.

ETA: He did it twice. I've mentioned this one nearly seven years ago, and then again three years back.

Current Mood: ecstatic

Someone (quite reasonably!) asked if the new Deadlands Noir wasn't just going to be a Call of Cthulhu game set in the '30s. And I ended up trying to articulate the differences between the two. I think I may have gotten giddily idealistic (which is a weird thing to be when discussing a horror game, one which initially billed itself as "The Spaghetti Western... with meat!"); I also think it's worth saying.

See, in Deadlands, the enemies can know what they're doing and still be sane, and that makes a huge difference. You can be sane. The horror is a lot closer to the surface.

You can fight. You can, sometimes, win[1]. And that you did, that someone did, that can literally change the damn world. Might not make it a happy place, but you can at least keep it a human one.

I call Deadlands "Cthulhu and Six-guns", sometimes--a term from

theweaselking--but that's not "unbeatable eldritch horror and pop-guns". That's "in the bloody sneaking teeth of inhuman horror, among the crooked or the corrupt or the afraid, you may look into the darkness (or the pitiless glare of high noon) and pick up your weapon and stand your ground."

You may lose. Or you may die. But by god you can do it with grit or compassion or knowledge aforethought, flawed and human though you be, and that--that is where the game shines.

(Also? Zombies. Possibly even you.)

Deadlands is awesome. How they are going to mesh this with the mean streets of Chandler (down which a man may go who is neither tarnished nor afraid; I love that line), I don't know. I've seen what a good Deadlands game can be, though, and given the products to date I figure it's worth my time to see.

It may not be your thing (and that is more than fine!). But hey, they've gotten the second installment of the video story up, and if you are interested in the setting the first and cheapest thing they're offering is an illustrated story, no gaming required. Could do worse than check it out, you know?
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[1] Even if the Reckoners cheat. They cheat, the bastards, and I still get a pang in my heart when I think of Coot Jenkins. He came so damn close.

Current Mood: giddy
Current Location: 45.42015, -75.71653

Yesterday I was up until four in the morning. And then I was up and functional by eight. Somehow I'm still not tired. Admittedly there was a nap in there, but...

One of the people I write with a fair bit of the time is doing NaNoWriMo. It's rough going so far (mind, that doesn't mean much yet), but she's doing it. I, meanwhile, have written maybe three hundred words of fiction in two fragments this week.

I mean, it's just been Hallowe'en; I practically feel guilty about not trying. It's the time of year for (proper Lovecraft) ghouls and curiously meaningful scratches and shapes standing in the dark in the still of your room and just watching you.

You think.

You can't see their eyes, after all.

(Oh yes, this is absolutely going to help me get to sleep. Because I needed a chaser after reading a third of the way through the House of Fear anthology. It's a nice mix; part actual ghosts and part haunted houses, with a side order of the weird.)

Beginning to get sleepy, at least. The nice thing about the phone is that I can post in my room and don't get distracted by the joys of the internet or the horror of the Sierra Madre. Much easier to lie down and go to sleep if you don't need to tear yourself away from a computer motor.

(That's the Sierra Madre from Fallout: New Vegas - Dead Money. Which is a quite well-done little horror story set in a haunted house... one which both corrupts its victims and is inhabited by ghosts, now that I think of it.)

Tomorrow I'll try and get my books sorted, I suppose. And maybe I'll hear back about work. The estimated start date just keeps creeping forward; at this point I'd be surprised if anything happened before Monday.

Current Location: 45.31978, -75.87998

So, John and I are driving around, and between the GPS in the cars and our phones, it's a very well-informed trip. And it came up in casual discussion that many many horror movie plots have been rendered unworkable by the existence of these things--GPS systems and cellphones.

This is pretty obvious stuff; it ties back to the truism about horror movies being, in many ways, about isolation. Being able to dial 911 and start hiking out with a map that shows you your heading and the distance to the highway makes things a lot more manageable. (Or, you know, the amusing values of being able to Google something like "chainsaw sabotage"... But I digress.)

We went back to it later, a bit. If you eliminate the tactical elements of isolation, then what you're left with is two options. There's social isolation ("they won't believe me" or "they didn't believe me")[1] which has a long and storied history, including those godawful fifties movies about the aliens landing and the teenagers being the only ones to see them. Or else there's self-imposed isolation, where the protagonists don't want to call for help; what that sprang to mind was them being in a haunted house where they had no right to be[2], but Session 9 is also a beautiful example. The guy needs the job, there's no way to leave and get it done, and he can't afford to take the time to call for help. Alright, yes, there is definitely an element of social isolation there; that's fine. One kind doesn't need to do all the work.

So I am discussing this with John, and he points out that splitting up becomes a lot less frightening, a lot more manageable, if you have something like Google Latitude in place. You know where people are, you can track them. And I nod in agreement, and then he smiles and points out that it isn't true.

"You don't know where I am. You know where my phone is."

I do confess I shuddered. (A lovely moment over lunch, to be sure.)

Because that takes it out of isolation and into uncertainty, which is the other great foundation of horror. The world crumbling out from under you, slowly or suddenly. In some ways it ties to isolation--not having anything you can be sure of to reach out to--but it's a basically different development. It's the horror of "The calls are coming from inside the house!", which relies not on there being no-one to help but on the space that you were sure was safe being taken away.

So that's something else to look to, I guess. Not sure how much good it'd be for movies, which don't necessarily have a lot of time to establish certainty, but definitely something to keep in mind for written work.

(ObDisclaimer: no, not all horror movies rely on isolation. Scream, f'r ex, handles the advent of the ubiquitous cellphone quite well.)
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[1] See also: all the travel horror that involves being surrounded by those terrible strange Other People (usually brown).[3]
[2] Or this 90s movie about four suburban guys out for a night on the town who accidentally see a murder and don't want to call for help because they hit someone with their car... I will try and look up the title later.
[3] ...echoes of HP Lovecraft, actually...

Current Mood: thoughtful

John showed me this trailer. I found it creepy as all hell, which I understand is the point, and then of course I got to the end of the trailer and saw the title and...

Ohyes. I will be there.

(The link above is to download the trailer. If you're one of those who'd rather not know which story it is before watching the trailer, I recommend that one. Otherwise, it is on YouTube.)

Also, the scene at 0:55 makes me think of "Lost Hearts"; I know the BBC did an adaptation of it for the screen already, and would very much like to get my hands on it.

Other news... relatively little. I have a bruise about the size and colour of a small plum on my arm, and I really do think either the bus drivers or the bus brakes are being a little peremptory these days. And it's Friday, TGIF.

Current Mood: chilled

So I was thinking of organizing my books on Goodreads, as you do. Was thinking about putting on a "haunted houses" tag. And I've been going through a lot of stuff on TV[1], and now watching Marchlands, and...

I like haunted house stories. And I'm trying to pinpoint exactly what they are. Asked John what he thought the best written and movie ones he'd read or seen were, and he said The Shining and The Others, respectively. Switched the book choice to IT, though, and I cannot dispute.

There's the Haunting of Hill House, of course. And The Shining. Hell House, The Others. Then you get Rose Red, The House Next Door, House of Bones, Apartment 16, the Dionaea House, Ghost Ship, The Overnight, The Dwelling, The House of Lost Souls (which I actually just finished)...

John also suggested Event Horizon. I will agree and add in the town from Uzumaki, in the same "well, yes, but wait?" vein that his selection of IT gave me. Yes, absolutely, but the fact that I'm including them both makes me think that I don't understand my own definition as well as I thought.

So. What makes something a haunted house story, rather than just a ghost story?

( By the way, might be spoilers. Very very incoherent rambling and spoilers. )
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[1] Okay, Fright Night is pretty much what you'd expect from an 80s horror movie, but that last scene with Peter Vincent (who has awesome eyebrows, FTR) and Evil Ed? That was actually quite beautifully done.

Current Mood: thoughtful

A few days later [in June 2011] on the opposite side of the Atlantic, Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam signed a bill into law that makes it a crime to use the web to "transmit or display an image" that could "frighten, intimidate or cause emotional distress" to anyone who sees it. Those found guilty face a maximum of one year in jail and a $2500 fine.[1]

And, on the flipside

The US Supreme Court recently struck down a 2005 California ban on the sale of violent video games to those under eighteen. Speaking for the majority in the court's 7-2 ruling, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia wrote "California's argument would fare better if there were a longstanding tradition in this country of specially restricting children's access to depictions of violence, but there is none." He went on to cite the circulation of Grimm's fairy tales to children. "The basic principles of freedom of speech and the press, like the First Amendment's command, do not vary when a new and different medium for communication appears."

I'm annoyed by the first and relieved by the second, but... why on earth am I hearing about this from the latest issue of Rue Morgue, again?

The clerk at Mags'n'Fags was stocking the shelves and offered it when she saw I had the last issue, and I picked it up on impulse, since the cover had a Fright Night splash and a mention of a new John Shirley collection. (Also, I think I need to take a look at Haven; I do not have enough creepy in my TV viewing.) I've been sort of looking forward to it--Fright Night--since I saw the trailer and pegged the movie at the thirty-six second mark.[2]

This vaguely confuses me since I never saw the movie. I recognize the cover art, sure, but I am thinking I actually need to skip the articles on it since they are absolutely full of spoilers, and I persist in misremembering the line on the back of the VHS case as "Michael likes his drinks warm, red--and straight from the jugular!" Michael being the mortal protagonist, I am clearly off-base. (And now I'm just wondering even more how I recognized the movie, since misremembering the villain's name so throughly means it wasn't his introduction that tipped me off.)

Huh. Apparently Haven is based off Stephen King's The Colorado Kid. Will see if it feels as much like King as happytown did.

This early morning (relatively) rambling has been brought to you by an internet connection and fifteen minutes of free time.
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[1] Also, apparently there is no use for the Oxford comma in the writing of Tennessee bills. Not overly impressed.
[2] In a fit of "I am in early, yay," I just grabbed the trailer and checked.

Current Mood: cheerful

I overcooked dinner, and I just found out that that one horribly horribly creepy episode of the The Outer Limits that I remembered from I-don't-like-to-think how long ago isn't nearly as creepy as I remember.

It's surprisingly disappointing.

(That said, I will *not* be testing to see if the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is similarly less impressive.)

Current Mood: disappointed

Light of my life recovering from whatever's going around. Co-worker called in sick today, after mentioning Thursday and Friday of last week that she was feeling a cold coming on. I am so getting hit with this thing, it's just a matter of time.

Feeling a little angry and a little sad, and not sure why exactly.

In good news, I finished a catnip kick pillow for Angus, and he is happily... well, either waltzing with it or disembowelling it, you know how cats are. Also I got a chance to knit with hemp, which is nice. (Although what I am going to do with the remaining quarter-skein...)

Also, the last Criminal Minds has just finished with a Stephen King quote - "Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes they win." I actually don't recognize that one--anyone?

Current Mood: melancholy

Rainfall warning in effect. You don't say.

Well. The driveway is ice-free, the dog has been walked, and I still have dry patches on my clothing. I need to go out and get a teaball, and possibly salt and pepper shakers, but I think a hot shower is in order first.

(And if the temperature goes too low before I am ready to leave, I will dump my loose tea directly into the mug and worry about picking bits of anise out of my teeth later. It's going to be an ice rink out there once the temperature hits zero.)

What else...? Working my way through American Gothic and liking it; it's entertaining small-town horror (with, insofar as I can tell, about a four-per-month homicide rate). Points for not being overly explicit about exactly what Buck and Merlyn are.

Alo, realized that depite having finished a bunch of knitting projects lately, I still haven't gotten the pair of socks I was knitting for myself off the needles, and I started them a year ago on Thursday. I am holding off on buying any more yarn until that gets straightened out.

Current Mood: okay

Feed by Mira Grant

So by the time I was partway through, I had discovered I was liking this book more than I thought I would. I expected to like it--it's about valiant (and snarky) news-bloggers after the zombies rose, after all--but not this much.

I've finished the book. I think the story greatly benefits from my coming to it spoiler-free, so I'm not going to include any spoilers. It is one of those books I need to loan to people--it is smart, funny, involving, and makes sense of the zombies-caused-by-disease idea.

Also, the author said she cried when she wrote one scene. I cried when I read it. Don't know if you will, but I strongly recommend you go and get the book and find out.

Current Mood: thoughtful

Just made it home. (Work, you know. That whole thing where I start looking at Dreamweaver and two hours later I'm sort of blinking, trying to reconnect with the world around me in a way that allows for such meaningful interactions as, oh, getting around to eating, and wondering why my brains feel like pudding. But W3C-compliant pudding.)

There are no windows casually visible at work. I was surprised as hell when I got out and realized it was dark out.

Uhm... other things. Feeling a bit off, hoping it passes. Grabbed a coffee this morning to stay awake and worrying I might pay for it around 4 a.m. Baby jacket progresses. My books came in. I am reading Feed, which is actually not one of the books that came in, but it is more portable than nearly all the ones that did and really engaging besides.

I could make a triptych to represent so much of the last two days: the half-knit baby jacket, my laptop, and Feed. That worries me a little, actually. Probably just back-at-the-office nerves.

I want to go to sleep. Hopefully unwinding with a bottle of mineral water will prove to be an adequate substitute.

Current Mood: drained

I have not been happy to be awake so early in a while. :)

Morning conversation included US presidential terms, fictional timelines, and the Golden Age Green Lantern[1]. And coffee and eggs. And I am comfortably awake, and will head out for groceries in about half an hour.
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[1] Which is mostly my geekery, and of course has me itching to reread Moore's run on Swamp Thing.[2]
[2] "Of course" being because the original Green Lantern's powers were helpless against wood. Not the colour yellow. (Which I am sure you all knew.) Also because after being re-linked to "The Enigma of Amigara Fault"[3] yesterday I am missing horror comics something fierce.
[3] To be read right to left, in case you were wondering.

Current Mood: cheerful

Today was pretty awesome, actually. Got up and went out to see family that John was fixing computers for. Nice to see her again, plus she gave us a bag of clementines and me a new hat. Sort of a blue-purple very-thick-knit cloche with a pin that has a bunch of feathers on the side. It is the kind of thing I have always thought of as an old lady hat and I do not care, it is pretty. And warm. Besides, I am past thirty, I get to wear this kind of thing without needing to make a point of being ironic.

Stopped for lunch (possibly breakfast) at a new diner (well, diner under new management) that's not too far from out place. I liked it, will be looking to go back. Stopped home and then went out to see RED, which was pretty much what I expected and I am still really glad we got to see it on the big screen. Partly the big screen, yes, but the lack of distractions made it much easier to get into the movie. Not once did the pets interrupt.

Then we went by Chapters. Really, I am having trouble respecting bookstores anymore. There is so much junk, and hardly any of the books I am looking for. John maintains I should stay home and shop online, but I figure wandering around the shelves gives me a chance to see something I would not have known about anyway.

And I did. Any you know what? It was all either "[classic lit] + [monster]" or zombies.[1] Plus the stuff I expected to see, which was a solid dose of the Buffy the Vampire Shagger genre, King, Koontz, and the Usual Names.

( Tangent, on zombies. )

...right, that did kind of get away from me. As you were. :)
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[1] Except another Vandermeer anthology, which led to the observation that John is more tired of steampunk than zombies because he hangs around people who squee a lot more over steampunk. I asked him who the hell he was hanging around with. He said me.
[2] I mean, consider the vampire. Yes, the basic idea of the monster is horrific, but at this point I think some variation of the phrase "he's not sparkly, he's a real vampire" would creep into a lot of explanations of that. And when the sparkle gets so deeply associated with the perception of the monster, when it becomes not only familiar but banal, the story-telling power of the tool is weakened.
Of course, you can also say that the association of "destroy the head, and it's okay" with the zombies is an idea with a similarly neutralizing effect on the horror of the monster. Associates them with a purely mechanical solution, takes the focus away from what they are... And I suspect this shorthand, this taking the focus away from the zombie, is what allows zombie stories to be about people.
Okay. Footnote getting way too long, back to text.
[3] Or radiation from a downed satellite, or whatever.

Current Mood: geeky

Pardon me, but I had rather a lot of painkiller today. (Even my dentist was vaguely surprised that I needed so much freezing. And he called a couple of hours ago to see if I was okay. I am. I took more painkiller, too.)

This, by the way, naturally leads to the other topic; old pulp fiction. Because my dentist likes that stuff. He noticed I was rereading Misery, and we mentioned older stuff, and the next thing you know it's all "Lost Hearts" and "The Yellow Wallpaper" (I did *not* know it was that old; I would have guessed forty years later, at least), and Hodgson and M.R. James and Machen and trying to remember who wrote "The Judge's House" (it was Stoker).

It made the visit go a little faster, which is nice. And now I am pulling up "The Voice in the Night" for later reading. I'm also starting on The Night Land, which I not only haven't read before, I haven't *heard* of before. And he hadn't heard of "The White People", at least not to remember it...

I am reminded of the man I met at WorldCon, who said he'd never met *anyone* else who'd read "Evening Primrose".[1] There is so much out there, so much written, and some of it's great and some of it's good and most of it's got *something* to it...

And it's being forgotten. I mean, yes, stories happen when they're read, but they get passed on when they're passed on or talked about or even remembered together, and you can't do that if no-one remembers them with you, or if you can't get your hands on them to relay them.

And on the topic of things being passed on by words: if you're up for a radio drama, the BBC has Pontypool up online. It's about zombies. Or a story. Or a mimetic plague. I believe that it's a slightly trimmed-down version of the movie soundtrack.

(Some of these stories were easy to find online. Some were not. Aside from The Night Land, I did not link a single damn one that I did not think was worth the time to read; I'm reserving judgement on that one, obviously. Mind that the middle section of "The White People" is a bit of a text-block; it's the journal entry of a young child. It is also the only short story I have ever had to put down for a bit, although I picked it up again within the hour.)
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[1] And that was a royal pain to find online.

Current Mood: indescribable

So. Up at three to let the dog out, found out one of the cats had made a mess, cleaned up, did dishes, threw stuff in the laundry, set the load running... and of course being tired meant this was all in slow motion, so it took me a while to get back to bed. (Although the discussion was part of that, and was fun.)

I did have a chance to check my e-mail, and link-bouncing led me to a fictional transcript and obituary. Also, the first short-short here made me grin, and the second is a rather pleasant take on fairies.

The interview yesterday... really did not go so well. I like to think this was in part because I was thrown for a loop[1], and not because I am naturally disposed to give bad interviews.

Being downtown in the early morning again's interesting. I'd forgotten how awake it seems. Also, I have just realized how many art/readings/band/show flyers there aren't on the telephone poles out in the suburbs.

There was a garden at the corner of MacLaren and O'Connor that I always rather liked. It was really thick with tall grass, flowers that came up to my shoulder, vines on stakes... It's mostly just mowed flat now.
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[1] "What was high school like?" "What did you like about it?" "How did you spend your summers?" "Who were your inspirational figures in high school? In university?" I mean... It was high school, it was last millenium, and it was not a position which required exceptional social skills or a particular adherence to cliques. I refer you, somewhat grumpily, to the sixth panel here.

Current Mood: restless

No, really, just can't sleep.

Have Hannibal Rising on as background noise. Really not impressed--( spoilery ), all the while being pursued by everyone's favourite alcoholic authority-bucking Irish cop from The Wire. (I thought I saw Martin Ruber from The Lost Room, but it was just a lookalike.)

So. You know. Bit surreal.

...I suppose being able to articulate all this means I'm not as utterly blank as I was yesterday. That said, *still* can't sleep, and I've been writing this for half an hour.

Going to walk Pipes in a bit. It will do her good, and I might as well do something useful.

Current Mood: annoyed

Your head buzzes with black and heady secrets. It's an intoxicating feeling, although not a comfortable one. You leave, realising as you do that the smirk playing around your lips is not entirely your own.

As you go, a squad of Special Constables with white gloves and heavy canvas masks comes up to disperse the crowd. They bring up a squat brass machine on a wheeled cart and begin to spray the offending wall with cleansing acid.

Alright, it took me a while to finally give in... but I am *so* glad I finally started playing Echo Bazaar.

Current Mood: ecstatic

I watched Session 9. And I have just put in Frailty. For the next movie, I was thinking Jacob's Ladder (since What Lies Beneath didn't *quite* seem to fit.)

Suggestions for other movies in the same vein?

(Also: vaguely saddened by the fact that AFAIK none of the ones I mentioned except What Lies Beneath pass the Bechdel Test.)

Current Mood: thoughtful

You know that feeling you get when you realize you've probably been saying something really stupid, and can't quite place why, and it's nagging at you like the twisted strap of a poorly adjusted invisible knapsack?

I think I may need to go out, get coffee, and examine my privilege vis-a-vis being an adult who gets to leave ETA: socially-defined liminal spaces basically whenever she wants to, and how the protagonists of horror movies are frequently in a liminal/other space/role, and...

Yeah.

Current Mood: embarrassed

Cemetery Dance--the publisher, not the magazine--is releasing The Painted Darkness by Brian James Freeman for free.[1] You can grab either the PDF or get streaming audio from downloadthedarkness.com, the ebook's got a code for $5 off the hardcover, and I really can't see a downside to this.

(Found it a tiny bit stiff to start--of course, I've been writing in nearly the exact opposite style when I've been awake today--but am already on the second chapter. And am curious, dammit, so I will keep reading.)
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[1] No, really free. Like, Cory-Doctorow-levels-of-free. No signups, no e-mails, no hiccups.

Current Mood: cheerful

Slept beautifully. John took me out to breakfast this morning, and dinner has been taken care of, and there is wine. Jo met me for morning coffee (before leaving the country) and got me the stitch-a-day knitting calendar I'd been eyeing at the LYS. And I have been sung to and given well-wishes and ohdeargod I don't think I'm old but I don't feel young anymore.

I got my copy of Feed.

Am kicking around ideas for a horror game. Getting oddly fixed on a list of objects; cameras, masks, keys. Mirrors. Sure there is something to work on all these with.

The air smelt of woodsmoke when we left the house. Fourteen miles further on, it still smelt of woodsmoke. Really hoping they get some rain over in Quebec.

I have been going through top ten lists of horror video games. Will shortly be branching out into books, movies, short stories... (Feel free to suggest something I should read that you think I might have missed, you know. Not buying any new books for a bit, but I do have this library handy.)

I feel I should say something more, but instead I will merely note that I am feeling cheerful and generally good with the world and hope you all have a smashing day.

Current Mood: cheerful

I had a terrible accident Sunday.

I wanted (1) a replacement copy of The Stand (one *with* Bernie Wrightson's illustrations) and (2) Mira Grant's zombie novel Feed. These were clear, safely defined goals.

So I went to a bookstore.

They did not have those books. In fact, no local stores had Feed, which I consider to be a bloody great failing on their part. I have been snickering cheerfully in all the places I'm meant to over A Local Habitation, I *want* to read this woman's zombie horror.[1]

So I am in the horror section of a bookstore with intent to purchase and no clearly defined plan.

...cue Blackout[2], One Bloody Thing After Another[3], Blind Panic, Infernal (Repairman Jack), The Glister, Monster Island[4], and Aftershock & Others.

(And the Godiva dark-chocolate-and-raspberry that they only sell at these bookstores, not at Godiva. I'm serious. I checked their website.)

It will be an interesting few days.
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[1] No, not a broken link; she uses a pseudonym for the zombie stuff.
[2] Yes, it was in hardcover... but it's by Connie Willis! I love Connie Willis. And I was already buying books. And it's nice to support beloved authors. And... look, it's Connie Willis. There are not many authors I like so much that "Oh, hey, part of this book is set in London" becomes irrelevant.
[3] Mr. Comeau, your promotion seems to have flaked out a bit. My husband is a fan of your stuff, my husband knows what I love, and my first encounter with a book of yours with the line "Oh, I'm sorry I've been so distant, Jackie. My mother has more teeth than she's supposed to, and she won't eat anything that's already dead." on the back comes when I trip over it in a bookstore?
[4] David Wellington, who wrote 13 Bullets, which I mentioned here. Wasn't going to pick it up, but got into a brief discussion with a woman who was looking at one of his other books, and... yeah. So it goes.

Current Mood: cheerful

So, yesterday I went by the library. There was a briefly disturbing moment when I saw John Fowles' The Collector on the "New and Hot Fiction" shelves[1]; there was also a brief and shining moment of joy when I his Ex Libris and found a trade copy of Haldeman's The Forever War. Picked it up; I shall give it to someone who needs to read it. There are people who do. One of them should let me know who they are.

Second, John and I went out to dinner and then decided not to hit a movie. We went by Chapters instead. So I'm browsing the horror section (up to a whole three shelves!) and uttering the usual complaints when a guy comes by and says "You want a good novel? Here." And what he pulls out is a copy of John Dies At the End, which I knew had gotten a book deal but had never actually seen.

--dammit, I just realized I forgot to tell him about the Dionea House. Damn damn damn.

So anyway, he says he likes that kind of thing, web-writing style. Suggest anthologies--short stories, wide variety of writers--and World War Z, which it turns out he has already read. John suggests Dracula--hey, it's a classic horror epistolary, right? Apparently the guy wanted that kind of quick style and/or zombies, so I ended up handing him only copy left of the Living Dead anthology from Night Shade Books[3] and what purported to be an illustrated field guide from the first year of the zombie invasion. Fortunately there were multiple copies of that. Advised against Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, recommended Junji Ito, and got an enthusiastic enough recommendation of Death Note[4] that I will be picking that up. Also the 20th Best New Horror, the Lovecraft Unbound anthology, and Ellen Datlow's new Year's Best Horror. I'll be picking all those up tomorrow, since that's when the 25% discount coupon comes into effect.

(I did get the 24th Year's Best Science Fiction today, since it was going for $7. By the way, I believe I also saw several copies of the 21st Year's Best Fantasy and Horror for the same price, and as I have mentioned before it contains Veronica Shanoes's excellent "Rats", starting on page 310. Seven bucks for over four hundred pages of fiction, what the hell are you waiting for?)

But yeah. What was meant to be a light wander through the store ended up in an discussion about horror with someone who was interested in the stuff, resulting in me picking up a couple of things I wouldn't have otherwise. Nice way to end Friday the 13th.

Spent about six hours trying to write a post describing a striptease from the dancer's POV. Turned out three paragraphs of something vague in detail but adequate enough to use to further the story. It is a royal pain to try and describe a performance in the written word.

Finally, have decided I dearly, dearly love Supernatural's current take on fandom. Remember, it's really not jumping the shark if you never come back down.
---
[1] I mean that thing is how old?[2]
[2] 46 years. Well, I suppose it's good that people will have another chance to run across it...
[3] Lovely people and amazing... what do you call a publisher's collection of books? Not a stable, not a midlist... Anyway. Highly recommended.
[4] He actually pulled it off the shelf and dropped it on the pile I was carrying. Given that I actually didn't get any indication that he was fuzzy on personal space, I took it seriously.

Current Mood: happy

Been catching up on Final Girl, and snagged her top fifty movie list.

~~Halloween (1978) dir: John Carpenter~~
~~The Exorcist (1973) dir: William Friedkin~~
~~Psycho (1960) dir: Alfred Hitchcock~~
~~Night of the Living Dead (1968) dir: George Romero~~
~~The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) dir: Tobe Hooper~~

Frankenstein (1931) dir: James Whale (read the book)
~~The Shining (1980) dir: Stanley Kubrick~~
~~The Thing (1982) dir: John Carpenter~~
~~Alien (1979) dir: Ridley Scott~~

Nosferatu (1922) dir: F.W. Murnau (two thirds of it, and then I fell over)
~~Dawn of the Dead (1978) dir: George Romero~~
Bride of Frankenstein (1935) dir: James Whale
~~A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) dir: Wes Craven~~
~~Jaws (1975) dir: Steven Spielberg~~
~~The Blair Witch Project (1999) dir: Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez~~
~~The Haunting (1963) dir: Robert Wise~~

King Kong (1933) dir: Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack
Rosemary’s Baby (1968) dir: Roman Polanski (rtb)
~~Dracula (1931) dir: Todd Browning~~
~~The Evil Dead (1981) dir: Sam Raimi~~

Poltergeist (1982) dir: Tobe Hooper (rtb)
Black Sunday (La Maschera del Demonio) (1960) dir: Mario Bava
~~The Phantom of the Opera (1925) dir: Rupert Julian~~
~~An American Werewolf in London (1980) dir: John Landis~~
~~Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) dir: Jack Arnold~~
~~Friday the 13th (1980) dir: Sean Cunningham~~
~~Evil Dead II (1988) dir: Sam Raimi~~

Alucarda (1978) dir: Juan Lopez Moctezuma
~~Carrie (1976) dir: Brian DePalma~~
~~Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) dir: Francis Ford Coppola~~
~~The Fly (1986) dir: David Cronenberg~~
~~The Fog (1980) dir: John Carpenter~~

The Wolf Man (1941) dir: George Waggner
~~House on Haunted Hill (1959) dir: William Castle~~
Night of the Demon (1957) dir: Jacques Tourneur
Frankenstein (1910) dir: J. Searle Dawley (rtb)
~~Dellamorte Dellamore (Cemetery Man) (1994) dir: Michele Soavi~~ such an excellent movie
Thriller (1983) dir: John Landis
~~The Addiction (1995) dir: Abel Ferrara~~
~~Aliens (1986) dir: James Cameron~~
~~Phantasm (1979) dir: Don Coscarelli~~

The Thing from Another World (1951) dir: Christian Nyby
Zombi 2 (1979) dir: Lucio Fulci
~~The Mist (2007) dir: Frank Darabont~~
~~Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983) dir: Jack Clayton~~ (migod, a decent adaptation)
The Living Dead Girl (1982) dir: Jean Rollin
The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962) dir: Joseph Green
~~The Return of the Living Dead (1985) dir: Dan O’Bannon~~
Suspiria (1976) dir: Dario Argento
Salem’s Lot (1979) dir: Tobe Hooper (rtb)

Also Don't Look Now (which I haven't heard of), and The Brood (haven't seen it, read the book).

She's also got a list of ten very good horror movies that you probably haven't seen. I hadn't even heard of six of them. Will be taking a look, I think.

Current Mood: optimistic

So. I'm watching Threads.

I cannot properly express exactly how bleak this is, although it does occur to me it might not have been the best choice for post-midnight viewing.

(And I was in such a pleasant mood after the quiet evening in and the glass of wine...)

Current Mood: depressed

Took John out to dinner last night. Discovered I don't like (traditional, gin-and-vermouth) martinis, but bellinis are okay. He explained calculus to me once we were done eating, and when we left the kindergarten teacher at the next table told him she'd blame him if she had nightmares about it. She was laughing about it; nice lady, I think.

Came home and fiddled around with the Random Art Prompt Generator for a bit. Caught All the Boys Love Mandy Lane and then couldn't settle on anything to watch, so I eventually curled up and rewatched Teeth. Discussions of why I classify that as a comforting feel-good chick flick are welcome, but probably kind of redundant.

Work starts tomorrow. Need to iron blouses.

Current Mood: content

So, I hear the Internet is good for friends and relations of friends and relations...

Michael Bey has just started pre-production for a remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street.

There's this lady I know (hi, Jen!). Her husband, Matt, is a SFX make-up artist and a character actor. He went and joined a talent agency to try to get a screen test for the role of Freddy, but Platinum Dune is taking care of casting, and they're not looking on the EC, and there's no way to contact them directly.

I can only begin to imagine about how much Matt would like a chance at the role. A/y, he put up a YouTube clip, and he's asking for people to pass it along, hoping maybe somebody will know somebody who knows somebody... Can't hurt, might help, please God. You know how it is.

If you'd care to pass it along, the clip's here.

Further note, developed from previous post:

The children have the power, either to be the monster or to stop the monster.

Hmh. The unaged might be a better word. I was going to say the unspoilt, but Freddy and Michael and Jason definitely aren't that.

Admittedly, in a lot of modern horror novels, the protagonist isn't a child, but a widower--and when they are a child, it's usually a literal child, not a late-teens individual who's resisting the lure of sex, drugs, and growing up.

In horror novels (and frequently stories), children are also barometers. If the kids all think one particular child is awful; if they start talking about their invisible friend after you've moved into the house where the murders happened; if they have hysterics because the scary lady put their tongue out at them, and her tongue was black; if they start trying to choke their siblings instead of giving them Indian burns...

...look, just move. Move right away. Grab the cat, stuff your armload of goods into a duffel bag as you're walking out the door, and hit the road.

(Of course, I'm now thinking of Salem's Lot, where the two who survived Barlow are a widower (Ben Mears) and a child (Mark Petrie). And let us be honest; Mark went through a hell of a lot more than any other character in the book and came out a hell of a lot better.)

But yeah. From the generally presumed to be more adult perspective of the horror reader[1], both the widower and the literal child share a particular quality: society says it's okay if they're outsiders. And from this priviledged outside perspective, they can see what's coming or what's there, because they are neither protected nor blinded by the social understanding of what is correct.

And this priviledged outside perspective comes with the isolation that's such a critical element of horror.

(Okay. I really need to sit down and articulate the difference between slashers and others. I think it might just be that the commonly intangible elements of horror (evil, isolation, arguably moral strength) are given material form? Probably it's more of a continuum. Will work on that later.)

But in slashers, the (functional) child has the *power*, pretty much throughout. In other works, there's a sharper division between the role of hero and monster--the adult hero is more likely to protect a world without rejecting adulthood, and the child is more likely to just have *insight*, rather than power. You don't get the case of the slasher movie, where both hero and monster are resisting or retaliating against adulthood.

Mhm. Possibly a skewed impression; and even if it's accurate, it probably springs from the relatively compact story that you need to fit into your average movie. Still, something to mull over.
---
[1] Look, I know many of the people who read horror started reading it young. But most people who write do so for their peers, and most people who write it are adults. Slasher movies, OTOH, are made by adults and targeted at a teenage audience.

So. Link off a link, from

peaseblossom's journal; from Pretty/Scary, an essay on the final girl. (You know her if you've ever seen a slasher movie. She's the good girl, the one who doesn't do drugs or have illicit[1] sex, and the one who survives and probably kills the monster.)

Anyway, this essay--called "Demon of the Threshold: or, Why the "Final Girl" Can Kiss My Ass"--asserts that

The reason that the Final Girl can emerge victorious at the end of a slasher movie is that she remains a girl—a child who does not take any independent steps toward adulthood. The traditional acts “punished” by the slasher are drinking, smoking and sex—all of the fun things that adults are allowed to do and children aren’t.

And the first thing that came to mind, immediately, was the common element of all the protagonists in Stephen King's IT, when they're back in Derry after Mike Hanlon's call (or dead in the ground after not being able to come back). It's not that they're all rich, or all successful, or that they've all forgotten--Hanlon is none of those things, although being rich and successful does let them live in a kind of fairytale world--a modern fairytale, where you don't need to worry about money or security.

The common element? "I'm not sure," Beverly says,[2] "but I think we're all childless."

She's right. Not only are they all childless, but the space between their childhood and their adulthood is glossed over, deliberately absent from the narrative. Bill himself thinks of it as the Great Unknown, and wonders about it briefly, but it gets maybe a handful of paragraphs over the entire length of a thousand-plus page book.

Hell, forget the protagonists--Henry Bowers goes straight from childhood to adult without any real description of the process of maturation. (Given where he spent the time, this is understandable.)

And I think nothing is as big a cue that you *must* leave behind childhood and take on adult responsibilities as having a child. Possibly having your parents die. I've tried to articulate my thoughts about my grandmother's death, and I suspect it would be a bigger thing than that.

The essay also goes on to observe

The slasher [...] defends the barrier between the world of children and the world of adults, and will not allow anyone to pass. If you look at the background story for all of the classic slasher figures—Freddy, Jason, Michael Myers—you find that every one of them emerges from a torturous realm of abuse as a child (sometimes, as in Freddy’s case, a child cursed even before conception). If you could rip away the killer’s dreadful mask, you would find the face of an angry child—trapped forever, like one of those fiendish things from the old German fairy tales which begin as a little boy or girl and then spend centuries not growing up, until they become unspeakable.

Now, aside from a sudden desire to go hunting up these German fairy tales because that is just a lovely idea and I want to see it, it's a good point. (Also, it's somewhat reminiscent of Batman's origin and current motivations; something to look at later.)

The essay goes on to argue that both the Final Girl and the monster are conveying the same message; that becoming an adult gets you killed, so don't do that. The adults die. The child that didn't grow up right kills them. The child that's still a child defeats the monster and lives. And what comes to mind there is the line "Childhood ends the moment you know you're going to die"--I have no idea where that's from and I'm just writing right now, this is raw reflex stuff, I'll dig up references later because I'm worried that if I stop to Google I'll get distracted and loose my words--which has always rung true. Maybe not the *whole* truth, but a goodly chunk of it.

And the writer--a mother raising two kids--finishes with

You accept your own mortality; the knife descends. It is a death of sorts: the death of a child who regarded himself/herself as the center of the universe, and the birth of an adult who is capable of real love and sacrifice for another.

And in a slasher movie, where you identify with the Final Girl, you've got a flickering ninety minutes to be a child again. To be frightened and challenged and to succeed. To be someone who won't die. You can live in a Never-Never Land where you have all the potential of an adolescent, and haven't done anything to screw up. And the world is never unfair, and your eyes into the story are the eyes of the kind and good immortal who will emerge bloody but unbowed, and safe.

Horror is about the Appolonian trying to survive the Dionysian. Slasher movies end with the Appolonian surviving, and a long golden day where the sun never sets.

It's not fine and subtle art and characterization. I *know* that. And it's all too often neophobic, anti-intellectual, and stunningly misogynistic.

I wouldn't call myself an intellectual, although I can at least function in an intellectual setting.

I'm a feminist.

I'm an adult.

And it's really scary. So let me watch my trashy horror movies, and love them for their cathartic scares, and their ritualized stories, and their brief chance to remember what it's like to feel young and immortal?

(God I love this genre. But I'm starting to suspect I need to take a *really* long look at its various types.)
---
[1] Ton of assumptions in that word, most of them reflecting the oft-teenaged nature of the protagonist. Sex with boyfriend if you're still living in your parents' house? Illicit. OTOH, sex with your husband in your own home? Not illicit. Also probably means you're not a protagonist, but this is a bit of a tangent.
[2] If it wasn't Beverly, my apologies. I'm going from memory here; I haven't read through IT in about a year.

Hit the library over lunch. Was going there to pick up four books. Came back with nine. So it goes.

But.

One of them was The 13 Best Horror Stories of All Time, and while I'm sure there's an argument against each of the stories, I'd be shocked if the ones I know didn't all make it onto the top 100 most influential cum fundamental horror stories ever.

The problem lies in that key phrase above, "the ones I know". I mean, the authors' names were all on the front cover, so I should really have expected it:

H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allen Poe, Bram Stoker, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Shirley Jackson, Algernon Blackwood, R. L. Stevenson, W. W. Jacobs, Arthur Machen, M. R. James, H. G. Wells, Oliver Onions, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman,

Given those authors, how difficult is it to tell (a) what the specific stories probably are, and (b) that if you are the sort of person whose eye is caught by this book, you have probably read ten to a dozen of them already? I mean, yeah, there are a couple of different Machen or Poe or Le Fanu stories that could be in there. But what are the odds that it *wasn't* going to be Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" or Jacobs' "The Monkey's Paw" or Jackson's "The Lottery"?

Oh well. For my inch-and-a-quarter wide hardback, I'll at least get a chance to read Onions' "The Beckoning Fair One".

I'd've liked to see "Lost Hearts" in there, rather than "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad"--I've *always* liked "Lost Hearts", and if you haven't read it I will simply note that it's here in HTML and here in PDF. But none of the stories are really surprising; even if I haven't read "The Beckoning Fair One", I've heard of it and understand that it's often put in this context.

But I was wondering (and I'm guessing if you've read this far, you probably have enough of a context for the answer)... what story would you put in there that you *know* isn't in the book? And which story or stories do you expect to be in there?

Because I have dozens of tabs open right now because they have cool things I've been meaning to share with people, and I should probably give poor old Firefox a rest.

First, Dead Eyes Open. Zombie comic. Was prepared not to be impressed, read the free downloads they had up, and... well... they had one of those moments where the author/artist show you something that makes sense, that isn't what you're expecting and yet that fits so perfectly into what they've already shown you that you just *grin*. Here, it's pages ten to twelve of the third comic. (More excerpts here.)

Also, they have props. (I love prop documents. Library cards for Miskatonic University, death certificates for Wraith games, references to Torchwood pamphlets... *glee*)

========

Second, Warren Ellis has something to say about Jack the Ripper. It's old--December 2003--but it's a neat idea, and damn it does nail exactly how much we know about old Leather Apron.

========

Hmh. There's a fifteen-minute indie short of "The Statement of Randolph Carter" up here. Looking at it and it's suddenly reminding me very much of Poppy Z. Brite's "And His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood".

========

Hey, there's a contest up here; explain what and why your favourite horror game is in 250 words or less. Figured it might be of interest to anyone who hadn't seen it.

========

(There is no fifth.)

========

Online comic called Stark Reality; new page every week (I think). Black and white, scratchy setting that feels like a slightly less urban version of MegaCity One. Short stories, generally black humour, kinda fluffy. I like it.

About two years ago, I ran across this nifty little online story. John Dies at the End.

It seems to *still* be online.

Given that it's coming out as a movie, this is faintly surprising, if good news. (Director's the same guy who did Bubba Ho-Tep. Yay.)

(Oh, hey!

literacity is quoted in the book trailer!)

Hope to god this one makes it out here. I'm still annoyed about the lack of Diary of the Dead in Ottawa.

Specifically, Hallowe'en III: Season of the Witch.

Overall, fun. The mix of science and horror very much reminds me of Westworld[1]. So did the general style of the movie, which considering that H3:SotW was made nine years later is... hm. Perhaps not such a raving review.

Also, I think I've now seen every quote[1] in "Cheeky's Haunted Hallowe'en Megamix" except possibly the ones about the clowns who are going to kill us all. Which might have been Killer Clowns from Outer Space, but it didn't make much of an impression if it was.

It's one of those movies that makes sense thematically but not practically. I like the basic story--mad Irish practical joker decides that the death of the year should be a Great Thing again, not just a night when you send children out in masks, begging for candy--and sets it up so that come Hallowe'en night, every child wearing a mask of his will... hatch.

I can get behind this.

(Can I say "hatch" when it's just your head turning into insects and snakes and every kind of venomous creeping thing? I feel it works with the basic sense of the word. Also, the one scene in which this actually happens onscreen was beautifully handled, and easily worked past the rather stiff acting of the child's parents.)

Unfortunately, the execution just doesn't quite measure up. The acting's too often a little stiff, there are a couple of questions[2] that are nagging enough to need answering, and most of them are of the "Wait, why didn't he do this practical thing?" type. It feels like the characters are following the train of plot, and lack motivation of their own.

That said, Conal Cochran absolutely deserved a better movie. Great character, subtle creepiness combined with a kind of old-fashioned gentlemanliness.

Glad I saw it. Glad I did other things while watching it. And I wish they'd actually managed to get the series off the ground as a kind of themed anthology; I could absolutely live with a Hallowe'en-related movie every year, rather than a handful of ones about Michael Myers and one odd one out.
---
[1] They're all, as far as I can tell, movie quotes.
[2] Ellie. Was she always one? Was she replaced? Either could've been creepy. Wondering is not.

First: there are spoilers under the cuts. They're spoilers for the book and movie, I guess, though the two overlap. But unless you don't mind a movie that has the least possible thematically and internally consistent ending I have ever seen[1], I recommend not watching the movie. Or just reading the book. Or possibly skimming the book and then watching the movie up until the last five minutes, at which point you can leave and beat the post-movie rush for the toilets. Seriously.

So, I saw I Am Legend.

I think I'm done shrieking in frustration now. Because, you see, it was good. It was really really really good, right up until the last five minutes.

It looked like it was gonna come through.

( First they set me up. )

You see? It's perfect.

( And then they broke my heart. )

Given all the beautiful beautiful set-up for the book's ending, I'm living in hope that they actually filmed that, and then chopped it off and tacked the theatre ending on to cover the stump. If this is the case, it may come out on a DVD as an extra.

Then all I need to do is buy the DVD, edit the right ending onto the movie, and have a horror movie party.
---
[1] I'm serious. You know at the end of the last The Time Machine movie, where ten minutes before the end they announce that the Morlocks do icky perverse things to the Eloi and the time traveller is suddenly possessed by the spirit of a gaming munchkin who thinks the best possible thing to do to the functional remains of the entire human race is blow them all up? This was worse than that. Because this was a really really good movie before that.
[2] Funfact: when the line "We named her after Marley." was uttered, I immediately assumed he meant Marley, Scrooge's partner in A Christmas Carol. This assumption was so through-going that when he added "Bob Marley," I was trying to remember why that didn't sound right and if Jacob Marley had a brother.
[3] I mean, she seemed nice enough, do not get me wrong. Just woefully woefully underinformed as to how the vampires she has apparently been surviving among for years actually *work*.

To be tagged along with the previous post on happy endings, for ease of finding in future...

--------

Full circle, he thought while the final lethargy crept into his limbs. Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever.
I am legend.
- Richard Matheson, I Am Legend

--------

Pleasant memories.

I spent just over four hours running a game session. Had dinner, came back, and then spent just under five hours at a Storyteller meeting for the LARP.

I think that, in future, I may try to avoid putting nine hours of storyteller work into one day.

(Also, can you believe that Wikipedia's entry on literary references to blue roses involved neither Peter Straub's Blue Rose Trilogy nor his short story "Bunny is for Bread"? The oversight has been corrected.)

First, I have begun watching The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.--it's hokey and occasionally a little stiff, but it's funny and has that oddly gentle/sweet mood that dashing heroics often evoke. I mean, it also has ( spoiler ), but I consider that to be an fairly essential element of heroism.

Second, I picked up Wolf's Complete Book of Terror from the library--purely on spec, just a case of a saffron-orange cloth-bound book where the spine was so scuffed that I only noticed the word "TERROR" and saw the little screamy-face icon the library uses--and it's great. (Anthology; the contents list is here, maybe two-thirds of the way down the page.) I've read about half of them before[1]; it's just nice to sit down with a heavy old book and quietly work through them.

Sadly, when I say "picked it up", I mean "borrowed it", not "bought it at Ex Libris". I need to buy a copy.
---
[1] I actually reread Boucher's "They Bite" about two days before I'd picked up the book. It was included in an anthology of stories based on real crimes--a short story by Abraham Lincoln, Ellison's "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs", etcetera--which was kind of interesting. Then I picked up Wolf's book, and it opened to the middle of "They Bite", again. I kept expecting a reference to show up someplace in a chat or post somewhere. You know how it is when you get several references to something, you start expecting another one...

I can't find my roll of stamps, and am about to give up on the bloody thing. Which is annoying, because there were eighty left on it, and buying ten-packs doesn't seem to induce it to come out of hiding. I have the horrible feeling that it will not show up until I actually go out and buy another roll of a hundred stamps.

This will have to wait.

I keep circling back to the "Shades of Gray" idea--essentially, copy protection be releasing variably corrupted files into pirated distribution--and being amused by how much it resembles the great and terrible screwjob perpetuated upon the 'net in the Cyberpunk 3.0 setting.

On a similar "terrible threat turned to individually convenient/profitable ends", I keep thinking about The Invasion. ( Spoily. )

Understand, I don't think this is a good thing, or a smart idea, and it's tailor-made for the condition-causing organism to mutate and break out again, which is no bad thing in an SF/horror story. But god it seems *possible*.

Shary Boyle paints and draws and does sculptures.

The sculpture isn't actually titled, but you can probably see where I'm getting it.

I actually really like the finer (more delicate, more detailed) porcelain sculptures and her black-and-white work. They're disturbing, and it's when the disturbing elements are subtle or reserved--like the foot on the first sculpture--it makes my skin crawl. Which is no bad thing, I figure.

Also, fourth sculpture? Scrubbing my skin off now. Will let you know if I need to send out for more carbolic acid. It's beautifully done.

Current Mood: shivery

ersatzinsomnia reminds me of something I think I'd tended to forget, discussed in more detail in this post and excerpted here:

Thus we have the entire official record of Hastur… tangential, incomplete mentions in six stories passed along a chain of four authors.

All of which highlights the essential mystery and charm of what is commonly referred to as the “Cthulhu Mythos.” The beings of the mythos, the objects associated with them, and their essential nature is not only unexplained, they are un-detailed to such a fabulous extent that all that really exists about them is an atmosphere, a lingering malaise associated with the idea of the beings... a flavor of musty tomes, forgotten secrets, and madness incarnate, brought forth in a whisper. Contrary to the bumper-sticker humor most Lovecraftian fans banter about, Hastur is not an ancient god from beyond time and space who comes whence thrice spoken is his name... you’re thinking of Bloody Mary. Hastur is indefinable.

I'm especially prone to nailing down things. And it's good, sometimes, to be reminded of how vague they actually are; that between Chambers and Lovecraft, you can't even tell if Hastur is a person, place, or thing.

(Not, you know, that the King in Yellow doesn't still get me all starry-eyed, and that I don't have definite impressions of Carcosa. Just that they're not universal ones.)

So. Over the weekend, I've watched three or four Masters of Horror episodes. Generally, I would have to say "meh" (although it does occur to me that "I was married to a crazed survivalist" is an excellent WoD excuse to pick up Brawl, Melee, and Firearms without being a crazed survivalist yourself).

But overall, sadly, "meh". I confess to being especially disappointed with the "Pick Me Up" adaptation; Schow's story was a brutal little stab wound, and the movie was flatter than warm rootbeer.

Then I sat down and watched the "Blink" episode of Doctor Who.

Oh god so pleasantly creepy.

Stopped by the Comic Book Shoppe. Flipped through a couple of horror comics (migod, there are so many more than there used to be, back when I started reading...); one the first issue of something called Bump from Fangoria--clearly I have been not paying much attention to comics lately, since Fangoria putting out comics came as a complete surprise--and one the fourth issue of Secret from Dark Horse.

( Spoilers. )

( Impressions. )

Interesting.

It's putting me oddly in mind of Fred Clark's post here, on how One Does Not Do Such Things even if They Do--not because they are a good person or a fragile flower or any such reason, but because One Is Not Bad. Dammit.
---
[1] Ah, bless you, decade of the oughts. How *would* we properly express concern about strange savage degenerate outsider cultures without your movies?
[2] Yayyyy! Freddy!
[3] Oh, hell. That's a decent idea, actually--I can see it in Deadlands. Yank that setup, have dead victims as well as the killer's body hidden away, and have the victims rising from where they were left angry because just retribution was never exacted. Sure, the Sheriff's daughter was protected, and justice was done for *her*--but what about the unnamed, unburied, unavenged others? How are *they* going to rest easy?
Reminds me of the suggestion that a proper fair and legal trial, followed by a sanctioned hanging, might be enough to put down a Harrowed. Social ritual, justice acknowledged, secrets brought to light, memoriam. All that good stuff.
[4] This is notable only because they are human to start with. Freddy Kruegar or Pinhead may be expected to not participate in normal human society. Slasher movies often have a villain who is superficially human--it's the buddy or the cop or the rejected girl or the boyfriend who can function in society, and breaks out the butcher knives on the sly. What I'm talking about is different: the idea of someone who *obviously* doesn't meet society's norms, who clashes with the existing culture--a barbaric archetype.

Right.

Anyone who, when discussing Dr. Henry Jekyll as presented by Mr. Stevenson, makes statements along the lines of "deliberately created the elixir so he could get away with horrible perverse things" or "didn't feel bad about it at all" (or "only stopped being Hyde because he was afraid Jekyll would be tried for murder", dear ghad that one especially annoyed me)?

No longer allowed to have the statement "I read the novella" carry *any damn weight whatsoever* when it issues from their mouth or keyboard.

*fume* *snort* *hmph*

I am suddenly imagining an alternate history in which Burke and Hare[1] are great heroes for having saved the world from the zombie menace.

There would probably be a Saturday morning cartoon featuring their exploits.

(Tangentially,

mrsoles posted a link to I Sell The Dead in

unhallowed_met, but I swear the B&H idea came to mind before looking at the site. Also, his The Resurrectionist sounds interesting.)

(Would you believe Firefox doesn't think "resurrectionist" is a word? I am shocked and saddened.)
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[1] Proactive resurrectionists, who decided that waiting around for someone to die and then digging him up was too much like work, and skipping the "waiting" and "digging" parts.

Getting into a Peter Straub book is like coming home and settling down, going to bed after the day is gone. Quietly happy, you go into the darkened bedroom and sit on the edge of the bed, careful not to disturb the person already sleeping there. You change out of your clothes, lie down, pull up the sheets, and shuffle over enough to drape one arm gently over them while they sleep.

And lying there in the cool dark, you come to realize that you are holding a corpse.

I've been working slowly through Peter Straub's in the night room. I haven't read lost boy lost girl and was worried that this would be a problem, but if I'm missing anything I can't tell. It doesn't seem any more fantastic than his other novels that I have read, although I think the fantastic is showing up earlier. His writing always strikes me as restrained, almost remote; if I had to compare it to any other author, I'd refer to the patience found in Bradbury and the dreamy progression of events in Marquez.

He's a very good writer, I think, but he's never been one I could read *lightly*. I may have to put the book down until next weekend if I can't clear a solid block of time for it.

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Have an appointment to see the tailor on Monday. I know it is both perfectly acceptable and quite practical to send her pictures of dresses I like in advance, but every time I think of doing this my brain vapour-locks. It's probably not odd, all things considered, but it's not pleasant either.

I will try to clear twenty minutes tonight to sit down in front of the computer and go through the relevant folder.

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Also working through a Vernor Vinge collection called Threats... and Other Promises. I haven't read his short stories before, and the ideas carry a lot more of the narrative than in A Fire Upon the Deep. They don't lack characterization, but they're short enough that in the three I've read so far the characters reasonably learn about and react to one thing. (I think "Gemstone" might turn out to be a little more involved this way; haven't finished it yet.)

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Pan's Labyrinth comes out tomorrow. The "Limited Release" tag is leaving me a little nervous; I am hoping it will be showing someplace we can get to. I really liked The Devil's Backbone, and would probably go see the movie on the strength of that alone.

(Given the trailers and tagline, I will not be going to see it on the strength of that alone. But I *would*.)

Among the webcomics I read is something called Angels 2200. It's set about ten years after a disease wiped out the male half of the population, and follows one particular squad (Icebreaker) of the Terran Space Navy, which is out investigating a particular uprising. I won't call it space opera, it's a little grim for that, but it's generally fun stuff.

In addition to Icebreaker squad and assorted ranking personnel, there is Lance. Lance is an android--introduced here and on the next page--who was left on the ship for the emotional/physical/psychological well-being of the crew. His initial programming[1] has mostly been deleted, as the crew in general finds that if you have an android whose purpose is to keep you happy around, cooking decent teriyaki and providing an opponent for fencing practice is more useful than anything he was programmed for at the factory. He actually doesn't seem to mind this; Lance is a sweet guy.

The ship has recently been damaged very badly. Mary O'Reilly, who was (entirely deservedly) in the brig until it broke, is out wandering around looking for help.

She ran into Lance.

It's those little touches of horror that make me happy in the morning.
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[1] Male android. Named Lance. Did I mention the male half of the population was wiped out? Okay, we're good.

In "The Colour Out Of Space", there's a mutating effect on local plants and wildlife before they die; they're oddly deformed, and their tracks (and presumably their scent) frighten those who know what they *ought* to be like, even if it's never quite nailed down how they're different.

There's a similar effect in "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", where it's noted that Hyde's appearance practically screams deformity and yet no-one could put a finger on *how*, despite the fact that people loathe him on sight.[1]

Outside of Lovecraft, I can't at the moment think of similar situations in fiction--where being exposed to a unnatural substance (preferably indirectly, in a kind of background radiation sort of way)--causes a physical change that results in something indefinably unnatural.

Anyone?
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[1] How very Promethean.

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Entries tagged with horror