Dark & Twisty

Stephen King says that Jack Ketchem is the scariest man in America, and he may be right.  If Ketchem isn't the scariest writer out there, then he is one that is willing to push human tolerance and behaviors to the limits.  He is not afraid to show you all the horrors of being human.

The Girl Next Door proves that Ketchem isn't afraid to scare people; no to horrify them.  I've read quite a few Ketchem books in the last year.  I won't say that I enjoy reading him because his subject matter is always gruesome, but I find him easy to read.  I find him to be visceral and willing to show the horrors the way they are.  In The Girl Next Door, he takes a real life case and fictionalizes it.  It's true the Psycho is based off of Ed Gein, but it didn't delve into the true deprevaity of that man, like Ketchem did with his Ruth.

The story shows how when given the opportunity, humans will turn to their darkest parts.  When told by an authority figure that doing something morally wrong is okay, we'll do it everytime.  I say we because I think any of us will.  The true horror of The Girl Next Door is that even good people do really bad things with enough motivation.  Ketchem realizes this, and whether he meant to express it in this story or not, does show us this fact.

Think about abortion doctors.  Some people think they are the most evil humans alive because they kill babies.  These people often take it upon themself to kill the doctors.  This they justify because they are killing a killer, but they are still murdering to stop murder.  Oftentimes, the killers of these doctors are strongly evangelical Christians motivated in a fury of religiosity to stop abortion.  They use the Bible or the creed of their faith to do such things.

Ruth and the children of The Girl Next Door are no different.  They don't use the Bible as their reason for the atrocities they conduct, but their own moral code that they hold higher than religion.  It may be that if these characters had a stronger religious allifiation that these things might not ahave happened.  Maybe not. 

The horror again lies in that any of us could and may have tortured and killed Meg for no other reason than we were told to  and it was made to seem fun.

 

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I've never wanted to read this book, but I found it cheap on audiobook, so I picked it up.  I'm glad I listened to this book instead of trying to read it, because I would have set it down much like I did One Flew Over's the Cuckoo's Nest.  Books about mental illness usually get put aside because I get too angry at the characters or it feels like I'm at work. When I listen to a book, I'm forced to keep going because I need something to distract me on long drives.

The story captures the ideations of a manic very well.  It should though, because it's a thinly veiled autobiography with some mixature of fiction thrown in for good effort.  The fact is that I did greatly disliked Esther, the main character.  I guess in the ultimate tradition of writing when you have a strong emotional feeling for a character either good or bad, the writer has accomplished something.

Posted by Jared at 09:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's been a while since I've hated on some folks but here it goes.

Of course, I'm going to mention Lil Wayne. I've been hatin' on him since before I knew what hatin' was.  He bothers me.  Just knowing people pay him to do what he does urps me.

Continue on rappers, Kayne West has made may list.  He's actually been on the list for a while, a long time before the whole Taylor Swift thing.  I even agree with him that Beyonce is more talented that Taylor, but don't go and say that while she's getting an award and thanking people.  The nice thing about Kayne is he breaks down the racial barrier for douche baggery. 

Uberconservative and Republicans.  Get over it, a Democrat won the white house.  It's not the end of the world.  He may not be doing the best job in the world, but neither did Bush, but you must have forgotten that.

Now for Republicans and Democrats and whoever else does this: calling our president Hilter, Stalin, Lenin, or any other horrible dictator.  It doesn't matter how bad things are (even with habeus corpus being suspended, thank you Mr. Bush.) no American president is anywhere as bad as those guys.  When Obama or any other president sets up concentration camps or gulags, then you can talk about horrible dictators, but thank you for showing that douche baggery knows no political party.

Celebutants.  Need I say more.

Miley Cyrus?  Why are you popular?  You can't sing and by the standards of teeny bubble gum pop you suck.  Trust me, I survived NKOTB, the backstreet boys, NSYNC, Britany, Christina, A-teens, Hanson, the Spice Girls, and S-club 7.  You ain't nothing like them.  "It's suckin' in the USA."

Now for hatin' for a nonhuman, MLA style.  I hate you with every fiber of my being.  Why can't the world just go to APA.  Why must science and art be so opposed to each other.  APA is so much simpler.

 

Posted by Jared at 08:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In an essay by Berkencamp, she discusses how Misery is about a reader writer relationship.  This was a idea I had not thought of it.  Berkencamp discusses that this reader writer relationship goes beyond actual reading of words on paper and the creation of that kind of literature.

The essay discusses how the characters learn to read each other and then how each character writers the plot of their adventure.  This idea is fascinating.  To think that a story about a writer and a reader turns into a story where each writes and reads the other's adventure.  The characters are actual writing the other's horror story.

Annie is writing the best horror book Paul could dream of.  She is tormenting him with his own fears.  She takes away his ability to do for himself.  She keeps him on the edge of pain and addiction so to manipulate him into what she wants.  Why else would a writer burn his prize property if he wasn't made to do so?  Annie wrote it with torture. 

As the book progresses, it is easy to see that Paul is able to read Annie better.  At first, he needed to read and reread her before he learned her language.  He learns that Annie has more twists than any great adventure novel.  The problem is that this page turner will kill him.  Once Paul learns the story, he can work with it, and he does.  Paul starts to manipulate Annie by writing a mystery around himself.  He builds his story to match hers but doesn't give any clues that he is building himself up with the giant typwriter, or that he plans of burning his manuscript. 

In the end, Paul gives Annie her worst horror.  He burns her baby.  She doesn't read the clues that are provided, maybe because she is so into the story or because she is ignoring different things because she doesn't want to see it.

Berkencamp has an interested thesis. A thesis that I can get

Posted by Jared at 08:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Is having number one fans scary?  It is if you have ever read Misery. This little gem of novel is what happens when you fall victim to a nut job. Stephen King may portray one of the scariest villians ever in this book, Annie Wilkes.  "Typewriter's missing an N."  Good because the scariest villian in a novel has two in her name.

Why is Annie so scary?  For one is a severely mentall ill patient not on medications.  This leads to alot of problems.  She has an explosive temper that becomes deadly or at least maiming.  She is obsessive in things, not just Paul Sheldon. Her penguin has to be just right.  This mental illness voids all her sense of right and wrong.  She mows a state trooper with her Murray. 

The second reason Annie is so so very scary is that she is the schizophrenic mother.  Norman Bates got to play a mean momma; Annie is the real McCoy.  If you disobey her, she punishs you the best way she knows how.  She'll make you burn your "cockadoodie" manuscript.  She'll withhold needed pain medicine.  She'll even chop your foot off with an ax. My momma was mean, but nothing like this.  She never tried to cut my foot off, and she's my biggest fan.

Then Annie, in a very strange way, becomes the lover.  Paul never feels much affection for his capture, but he acts like he does, and she believes him.  She is delusional enough for this to work.  Annie loves him so much she is going to kill him and her so that no one can share their love.  That's very scary.

Although, the reader learns as the book progresses that Annie is a bonefide sociopath.,(Like we needed any cockadoodie evidence.) that's not the scariest thing about her.  Books are littered with sociopaths that never strike fear into the heart like Annie Wilkes.  It's the twisted love she has for Paul that makes her so frightening.  It's love turned on its ear.  It's the form of love a stalker has, and this time she gets her man. 

I'm you number one fan.  Good, stay away from me.

 

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Pop culture and pop literature walk hand in hand.  Oftentimes, the culture popular at the time will influence what is written in popular literature.  The opposite is true as well.  When pop literature is examined through time, it is easy to see the popular culture of the time’s influence.  Charles Dickens, now considered to have transcended the status of pop fiction, wrote stories that were influenced by the culture of his day.  Pip worked in a sweatshop, gluing labels onto bottles.  Many children worked in similar sweatshops at that time.  The same can be true of the other poor characters Dickens wrote about.  Even though his stories dealt with social evils, the popular culture of that time was for those impoverished people to be treated such.  “And union workhouses? . . . Are they still in operation?” (Dickens, 1843) Scrooge asks. 

Perhaps the best example of how popular culture affects pop fiction can be seen in the Twentieth Century.  Nothing is more evident of how a pop cultural phenomenon affects pop literature than jazz.  When this musical style hit, literature picked up the culture and spread it around.  The works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and others of the “Lost Generation” picked up the banner and ran with it.  The thing is, now these authors are considered to be literary authors and held in esteem.  All they did was write for the popular audience often about pop cultural ideas.

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“The Dummy” is a short story found in the anthology The New Uncanny.  The premise of this anthology was to find out what modern authors felt was uncanny by today’s standards.  They used Freud’s treatise on the subject as their jumping off point.  The short story “The Dummy” takes into account what Freud called an inanimate object either being considered alive or in actuality and unknown to the main character, being alive.

In the case of this story, a traffic dummy, which serves to warn drivers about construction on a highway in Belgium, is the uncanny subject.  The story contains e narration of this dummy’s point of view.  In Victorian and Edwardian times when Freud would have formulated and written his treatise, this particular dummy would be considered an automaton.  By today’s standards moving dummies aren’t too uncommon.  Mannequins in stores move, and holiday displays often feature moving Santa’s and elves.  So the story serves at trying to update the idea by making this a robotic flagger at a construction site the uncanny object of the story.  The second narrator of the story is the human character. He admits that he has never seen a dummy like this.  He sees it as so human that he mistakes it for a man lying in the road when he comes upon the dummy again.  The dummy at one point even seems to have a pulse and heart beat.  This takes into account the Freudian idea of the uncanny that a dummy may be alive without human knowledge.

What the story attempts to do is make us feel like the mannequins and dummies of the world are watching us and commenting on our every move.  It attempts to play on the modern paranoia that we are never alone by making even the human-like dummies of the world watching us.  The strange thing is police forces started using this idea in the 1990’s.  They park a cruiser in the median of a busy highway with a mannequin dressed in a deputy’s uniform in it.  This causes drivers to slow down and be more cautious because they think a police officer is there.  The problem with this story is the unnerving sense of dread it tries to instill isn’t there.  Part of the uncanny according to Freud is the sense of unease we get from the object of the uncanny.  In the case of “The Dummy”, we are supposed to be unnerved that this road mannequin is commenting and watching the narrator’s every move.  The author, however, gave the narrator a more unnerving story than the dummy watching us.  We find out that the narrator is a bit on the edge of sociopathic intent.  He plans on killing his children.  The dummy makes a vague comment on this like he has seen it before, but still the unease comes from fact that the narrator plans of killing his children and has kidnapped them, not that the dummy is commenting on this.  In that way, “The Dummy” fails to bring the unease of the uncanny to play.

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