Dark & Twisty

Finishing up a course in reading of horror ended with an essay from On Writing Horror.  This essay discussed the quality of horror.  Yes, quality is to be had in horror.

The fact is horror is losing ground.  Many of our old standards have been stolen by other genres.  Romance writers decided that vampires were sexy, ignoring the whole fetid breath thing.  Ghosts have been passe in many ways for a long time.  We, as horror writers, overdid zombies ourselves.  Werewolves are still there but I just yesterday saw a romantic anthology featuring those lycans.  So that leaves us with two things.  One is we have to adapt or two come up with something new.

There isn't anything new.  Solomon said that in the Bible over four thousand years ago give or take a thousand years.  So, we have to take what we have and make it fresh.  That's quality.  All genre's suffer the same fate as horror.  Vampires are really just undead lovers in the bodice ripper world.  Ghosts are just the lovers who don't have bodies. The same tropes apply.

The essay discussed how freshiness and realiness is the maker of quality in horror fiction.  Vampires can be many things besides blood suckers.  They can be emotional vampires. They can live off of fear, love, laughter.  Imagine a clown that feeds off of laughter. Right there is (probably not) a fresh view of a vampire. It's grounded in reality as well.  A common phobia is that of clowns. 

Reality can also mean making sure the story, the horror is geniune.  Horror is one of the most fantastic genres.  There is little literal reality in it.  Vampires, ghosts, werewolves, zombies, witches and wizards none are real. But they can exist in a reality.  Part of writing good horror, or good fiction of anytime is making the world of the story real. That's all in quality. In the world of my clown laughter vampire the creature is real, but has to be bound by the conventions of that world.  Just as magic has to have its laws, which seems out of sorts, our monsters have to have theirs.  Our stories must be bound by the reality of that world we have created and that is quality.

Posted by Jared at 04:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Why is it that science and math are so feared in the Lovecraftian universe?  Dreams in the Witch House seem to take these fears to the ultimate conclusion.  Math will first drive you mad then kill you by a witch and little rat man.

It is strange that this short story should speak so much to me, but as anyone who knows me will tell you, I hate and fear math.  Gilman, the main character, was not afraid of math.  He was very fascinated with it.  The problem was he lived in the room where an ancient witch did some wonders with math.  This made him a prime candidate to be haunted by her and the devils of calculus. 

This story varies from other Lovecraft tales in that it is written in the third person.  It also seems more contemporary than other tales.  It still uses his tropes of the horrible unknown and the pull of the stars, but the “I am being driven mad by the unseen evils” is gone.  That makes the story more pleasurable to read.  The problem with the story is that it was too long for the payoff.  The story seemed to meander around and not really do anything except to describe how “creepy” things are.   The story could have just as effectively been told in a few pages. 

The story overall is a scary tale about how evil mathematics are.  Stay away from the math it will kill you.  So my advice is, stay away from math.  I tried to tell my mother that many years ago.

Posted by Jared at 08:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As I sit here writing this blog entry, it is a dark and stormy morning.  When better to write a Lovecraft blog?

I hope that no one is thunderstruck when I say this, but I like “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”.  It may just be my favorite Lovecraft story so far.  There are some reasons why of course.  One is that I fortunately don’t have to go mad from reading it.  It’s always nice when madness doesn’t follow reading a short story.  Also, Innsmouth is like so many creepy little places I’ve been to in my life, sans the fish people.

Lovecraft was a giant xenophobe and racist.  I hope that doesn’t shock anyone; it’s all over his writing in case you haven’t noticed.  This story seems to be the ultimate in his xenophobia (fear of strangers or foreigners for those not as familiar with phobias as I). Innsmouth is the ultimate creepy location of strangers. 

Lovecraft’s art of brooding mood plays well in this story.  His usual too thick description of putrid horror is just right for this tale.  The people, the houses, the bus are all so well described that you can see them.  You can almost smell the putrid smell of the town (I imagine fishy, like Bayou La Batre, AL in summer).  This whole story for that part reminds me of Bayou La Batre set in New England.  Maybe this is the reason I like it so much. 

Anyway, this seems to be the best of Lovecraft’s stories so far.  It’s an enjoyable mixture of his thick over description and xenophobic horror.

A plus HP A plus.

Posted by Jared at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Before reading “The Thing on the Doorstep”, I figured I could write this blog with ease.  A man is frightened to madness by what he sees on his door step.  Said madman will then relay his story to us with brooding language and minimal characterization.

Smack butt and call me biscuit if I wasn’t a bit wrong. Oh, there are characters torment to madness by fear and the horrible creatures that lay in the unknown, but it was the narrator.  He instead got to relay the changes he sees in his friend Ed as he is driven to madness. 

Lovecraft seems to have thrown a spanner in the works with this story.  He gives us an almost enjoyable story.  Typically, I cannot enjoy Lovecraft because of the trappings of Lovecraft.  I can see him in the story instead of the narrator or characters, but this was a bit better.  This round the madman is possessed.  But it isn’t that simple, he’s possessed by his wife who is possessed by her father.  That’s some kinky Freudian stuff right there. It takes a far more actual psychological turn than Lovecraft’s usual buffoonish attempts at psychopathology. At least Ed has a true reason to rant; he’s being possessed and controlled.  He is losing control of himself by magical means.

The other spanner is that the monster is killed, or so we think.  Oftentimes Lovecraft leaves the reader with the cliff hanger that the elder god or creature from the unknown is still lurking and that it may get us and make us mad or play mad songs or paint mad pictures.  In this case, Ed is shot and killed, but his story is different.  When the Thing visits the narrator, we discover it is Ed.  At the end of the story, we discover Ed’s psyche or personality if you will has been transferred to his wife’s dead, Innsmouth body. She was dead before she took control of Ed the final time.  This means that Ed isn’t dead, and that his wife’s evil psyche lives on as well, waiting to possess the next person, maybe even you.

I’ve read a variety of Lovecraft’s stories.  I won’t say all of them, but a lot.  This isn’t the scariest of his stories, but it has become one of my favorites.  The reason is that he broke from his tired, moss-covered, great cosmic horror and elder god mold, and it made the difference. 

Posted by Jared at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Here we go again.  Can I say that about Lovecraft?  Yeah, I can.  The Music of Erich Zann again brings us the first person narrator haunted by some horror beyond measure.  Something that lives the color out of space and the twisted weird angles of Lovecraft’s world drives another man to near madness.

It’s easy to pick on H.P.  There is a lot of time between now and then and when he wrote his works, he was really creating the new thing, but I have to wonder did people start to think that this is the same song and dance (no pun intended).  I think that today Lovecraft would have a serious issue getting published because of his almost lack of skill to come up with a story that doesn’t sound the same.

The Music of Erich Zann does take an original turn on the same of Lovecraft softshoe.  This story doesn’t involve seeing creatures so hideous it drives the narrator to madness.   This deals with sound.  Lovecraft did have a great talent of using visual stimuli to make his stories creepy.  In this particular tale, the way the houses are built on the street shows his talent for this.  Unfortunately, even his great talent for the foreboding and terrifying landscape is trite today.  This story uses music and sound to give the reader the creeps. 

The music of Zann is not really described very well, but the madness of his song comes through.  In real life, there is not much more unnerving (or annoying) than music that is arrhythmic or out of sorts. Dissonance is always bothersome.  The music in this story doesn’t seem to fall into this category.  Lovecraft, again never gives a good description of the music, but get that it is music.

Zann’s crazy melodies are just him running a bow randomly on the frets of his viola. He wasn’t beating on the back of the instrument like he was in a Philip Glass symphony.  The music followed its own scale.  It had its own rules that didn’t match the rules of music of our own world. That is creepy.

When it comes to favorite Lovecraft stories, this isn't one.  I can see his trying something different.  It worked.  He chose to use sound and music to haunt us with the uneasiness of his world.  Lovecraft definitely had his own world and it was filled with crooked little houses and crooked little men.  Fish people lived by the coast waiting for Elder Gods to ascend from the depth, and long dead Philistine gods still had worshipers, but with Erich Zann, he added a sound track.

Lastly, the story reminds me of an Elton John song.  It’s called “I’ve Seen That Movie Too.”  In this song, there is a guitar solo.  Nothing unusual about guitar solos in rock music; even though Elton is a piano player.  The unusual thing about this solo is that the guitar was recorded forward but is played backwards on the song. It sounds like music but follows its own rules like the music Zann played.

(For those who know me well, yes, I did work an Elton John song into this blog.)

By the way “I’ve Seen That Movie Too” is available on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

Posted by Jared at 08:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Jared at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Okay, this is going to be an unusual post.  I'm goint to blog about the Old Testament book of Hosea.  Why?  I decided to read what are called the minor prophets. I'm doing this to aid me in writing my thesis novel which depends a lot on misinterpretation of the Bible and made up books.

Hosea deals with a prophet by the same name.  God has this prophet marry a prostitute so that He can use this marriage as a metaphor for His relationship with Israel and Judah.

This book is one of the more disturbing in the Bible.  It is because of the way the prophet is treated.  His basically forced to marry a prositute, who then has children by her johns.  Hosea names them names like Not Loved and Not Mine.  Then Hosea is forced to remarry her and let her treat him badly.  The point is made plainly to Israel and Judah, but Hosea is truly treated horribly in this regard.

I add Hosea to the books of the Bible that truely bother me.  So for now it's Esther, Job, and Hosea.

Posted by Jared at 01:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

“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.

Posted by Jared at 07:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

After reading Freud’s treatise on the uncanny in horror, I started seeing the uncanny everywhere.  I will note that I have not had an antennae, cable, or satellite since 2006, but I do watch DVD’s often. 

One of the first places I noticed this uncanny use was on Star Trek: The Next Generation.  The character of Lt. Commander Data fits into the uncanny.  He is an artificial life form who acts like a living human.  He lacks certain qualities of humanity, however.  He cannot emote.  When he attempts to mimic human emotions, the attempt always seems creepy.  His laughter is stilted; his smiles insincere.  Data is like the puppet or the automaton.  He is likeable, however, because we feel for him.

Then I noticed the uncanny in play on the old British series, Are You Being Served?  One of the continuing gags on that show was the display items used to advertise products.  Many of the displays imitate human behavior and at times are mistaken for actual humans.  I remember the episode where the dancing robots, which are very creepy looking, end up being entered into a dance contest instead of the actual human dancers.  Then there was the episode with the robotic father Christmas that flashes people. 

The Twilight Zone besides having numerous episodes of the uncanny, of course has the eyeball at the beginning.  Eyes are so heavily used in the literature of the uncanny.  I think of the Dark Tower Series where the eye represents the Crimson King.  It was part o the uncanny too. 

Now I hate the uncanny because I see it everywhere.  Everywhere I look, even talking with my patients, I find that some of their delusions fall into the uncanny.  They talk about all powerful creatures, living human-like creatures or mannequins.  Delusional ideation about how we can see their souls through their eyes.

Posted by Jared at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Before I started working for Northwest Alabama Mental Health, a horrible thing happened in the town I was assigned to.  A 18-year-old male was arrested for driving a stolen vehicle.  He was being booked when he took the gun from the police officer and shot the three officers in the station killing them all.  His statement upon being arrested for multiple murders was, “Life is just a game.  Sometimes people die.”

The defense for this boy was that he played Grand Theft Auto so much he didn’t know reality from fantasy, and so when he was arrested, he thought he was playing a video game.  He got the death penalty from a jury of all women. 

I considered it uncanny when I read a short story that took that very idea and expanded on it.

“Continuous Manipulation” took the idea that life is just a game and showed how horrific that could be.  In the story, somehow a little girl’s game of The Sims becomes reality. Her family is mimicked on the game and they then act out the game play, so much so that the family never grows older.  Although this sounds wonderful, the problem arises in that the family of Sims characters are aware of the fact they aren’t changing and that things don’t seem to change.

It is something out of The Twilight Zone.  You are a character in a video game that a little girl who wants the perfect family manipulates to keep everything the same, but the characters are aware.  It is a form of perpetual hell.  I remember a similar TZ episode from the movie, where the little boy kept everything the same with his mind.  It was very similar.

Of all the stories in The New Uncanny, this bothered me the most because of the story about the kid in Fayette, but also because, I play only two computer games, The Sims and Civilization.  I sometimes let my Sims die because I tire of them.  Imagine if they were real people somewhere.  I would be playing God with their lives and killing them just because I want to.  According to “Continuous Manipulation”, life is just a game, but you never die.

Posted by Jared at 03:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Is there anything better than a satisfying ending?  Of course not.  A story that ends against what we want or desire really bothers us and we don't care for it at all.  I can think of the story In the Woods.  This story ended, but didn't satisfy me.

I recently read three short stories.  All dealt with insanity.  All had endings, but they didn't all satsify.  "The Tell-tale Heart" had the most satisfying ending.  We get to see the narrator taken away for a grievous murder, but we dont' really know where he is.  I like that we can have the leeway to think of him as sitting in jail or in an asylum.  There were no surprises or things that were not expected. 

Now, I also read "The Sandman."  This story is from German gothic literature.  The whole story was not to my taste.  I can see the benefit it would have.  It takes on the creepy structure that all gothics have, but this story didn't satisfy me because it seemed schizophrenic in the idea.  We are led to believe during the story that this evil man is something more than man.  He is taking eyes and killing fathers.  He is an alchemist.  Then the main character falls in love with a robot.  The fact that she's a robot and the evil man steals her eyes makes him crazy.   Then he kills himself.  This story bothered me because it started in one direction then ended up in some strange realm withe love robots.  It's almost like the main character deserved to die.  He was quite stupid if he couldn't tell the difference between a live girl and a wax doll. 

Then the last of the three story, was "Dread" by Clive Barker.  This was the newest of the stories, and didn't really satisfy me.  The story is a good idea.  It delves into the fears of two of the characters.  These characters are then tortured to the breaking point.  The problem is that the tormetor is then killed by what he fears.  The issue is that we never really get the fear of the tormentor until the end.  It doesn't go into as much depth.  The problem is that he is killed by his fear, but there's no build up to it. 

Three stories ended.  Two left me with a bad taste in mouth, and despite the fact that horror should leave that, I needed a tasteful bitter taste.  The Poe story ended well.  It made good sense.  The other two had much potential, but failed.

Posted by Jared at 03:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What about a unreliable narrator isn't to love?  Probably one of the best examples is this story from Edgar Allen Poe, the master of the unreliable narrator.

This story is like interviewing a mental patient.  For laymen, who will never have this opportunity, this story should be an adventure.  The narrator tells you that he is not insane, but tells the craziest story ever.  He even discusses the craziness as a sign of his sanity. 

Poe did a good job of going into the speech patterns of a mentally ill person.  The way he explains thing is much like a mentally ill person does when trying to make you believe that all their delusional ideas are sane. 

Now, why is this scary?  That's easy.  A person who believes his own delusions will hurt you.  In his twisted mindset, he believes that you wish him wrong.  He'll stalk you nightly planning your death, then strike.  It's terrifying to think about.  The real scary thing is that person could be anywhere.  Many people who hold such paranoid delusions or have paranoid personality disorder may have never gotten treatment for his their disorders.  They could be in the next apartment fixated on something.

One of the most fortunate things about people this sick is that their paranoia usually keeps them inside.  They fear the outside world and wont' leave too often.  Only in this story, the paranoid narrator lives with the focus of his paranoia making it easy for him to strike.

So, do you hear the beating of the heart?  Or does your neighbor look a little too suscipious?  Maybe, just maybe you've got a paranoid personality beside you or within you. 

Thump. . . thump . . . thump. . .

Posted by Jared at 02:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm going to talk a bit here about old school gothic stories.  This is a preface to the beginning of my new horror documentation.  The thing is; I hate gothic stories.  I hate the way they are written.  I hate the language they use. 

The stories are supposed to be all creepy and then they just don't pay off.  The stories oftentimes deal with ghosts, which aren't my favorite subject.  For some reason, I can suspend disbelief for just about anything, werewolves, vampire, zombis, but ghosts I just can't do it. 

I also don't like the old school stories because they are or feel so hokey.  The ideas of alchemey and witchcraft just don't amaze me.  The old science ideas that come up in this literature seems so unreal to me, that it causes me trouble.  I even try to read the stories as a product of their time. I still can't get into them.

The last thing that bothers me about these kinds of stories, is they are so often written in letter form and break down the fourth wall.  They address the reader and play with them.  I don't like this in books.  It annoys me to no end, for the gentle reader to be addressed so much.  I generally dislike in all literature that it is found in, but it seems more prevelant in 1700's and early 1800's literature.  Give me a break.

But anyway.  I've made my rant against old gothic literature.  Now I must read some.  (Actually, I've already read a particular story, I'm just waiting until next week to do my discussion of it.  Needless to say, I'm going to have some issues with it."

Goodbye old gentle reader.

Posted by Jared at 09:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I had trouble catgorizing whether this is a story or book review.  It is a stand alone book, but Dr. Arnzen refers to it himself as a novelette.  So I chose story.

 This is a delightful bit of horrific reading.  This may be one of the most disturbing thing I've read in a while.  It wasn't the gore that got me so much as the premise.  The truly scary thing about this story is people would really do this if it were possible.

If a man could have sex with a dog and raise a breed a puppies for fighting they would do it with little thought.  Not all men, but those who enjoy things like rooster and dog fighting.  These are gruesome games.  I would imagine that if humans could make human-sized roosters they would do that too.  It would be Foghorn Leghorn fight.

The other scary thing is how easily the main character turns to supporting these strange creatures if no the fighting lifestyle. 

The only real question i had about the whole thing is what rancid butter smells like.  I've never smelled.

If you can get your hands on this one, read it.  It's worth it.  (The text only comes in a limited fashion so many leatherbound and paper back editions.)  FYI, I picked mine up on Ebay from the publisher.

Posted by Jared at 09:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I finished Dan Simmons' The Terror recently.  I liked it alot.  It was a bit long, but I never got slogged down in it.  I happened to be in my very small, very crappy local bookstore a few weeks ago and picked up an anthology called The Living Dead.  The first story in this book was "This Year's Class Picture."  by Dan Simmons.  I sat down in the mall and started reading this story.  My wife was in JC Penney buying shoes or something, which I cared nothing about.  As I studied the story, I found it very interesting.

The premise is that the world has ended for living life, for the most part. It never mentions why which in most zombie stories isn't that important.  The main character is in a school with her dead fourth graders.  She has been teaching her zombie class for a long time which is illustrated by the mention of the class pictures from various years going from professional to polaroid.  She finds a new student (zombie of course) trying to get into her compound.  She makes him part of her class. 

The teachers attempt is to teach the dead students.  She uses some Skinnerian training techinques of positive reinforcement.  However, she is never really successful.  After a terrifying onslaught of zombies that she fights off.  She lets her class go only to realize that they had learned.  She saw several smiling at the camera from the picture.  Then her class returns ready to learn.  She starts to teach again.

This story kept me wondering what was going to happen.  I didn't know if the teacher would be eaten when her class turned on her and that would be part of the picture or what.  I enjoyed the story.  It gave much to think about that zombie stories don't have to be all gory and death to all humans.  It also doesn'thave to be death to all living dead.  This story wasn't The Terror, but it was good and gave me much to ponder. 

Yea, Dan Simmons.

Posted by Jared at 09:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Stephen King.  What else needs to be said?  I recently read "Autopsy Room 4" just as a pallette cleanser.  This is a King short story.  Those who know me, know that I think King is a better short story writer than anything else. I've liked some of his books in the course of my readings, but he usually always gets me with a good short story.

This story is good.  The guy is awake as they prepare to do his autopsy.  It turns out he was bitten by a snake that causes death-like paralysis.  He is saved because someone finds the snake, and he gets an erection when the female medical examiner plays with his snake while examining a war wound. 

There is nothing extraordinary about this tale.  There have been plenty of near death, buried alive stories written.  I just can't say that any of the end with the person being saved because he pops a postmortem, non rigor mortis boner.

Stephen King.  What else do I need to say?

Posted by Jared at 09:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I had hoped to blog several more entries about The Dark Decent and the stories therein, but I was not able to.  So I thought I just type some thoughts about short stories in general.

I really like the short story form, not only to work in but to also read. When reading, I consider them to be light snacks in the middle of the hefty meals of novels that I digest.  I have tons of longer works to endure and read. I get tired of them occasionally so I always have a short story collection around to cleanse the pallette.

The interesting thing is that short stories come in bite size pieces.  They don't require hours to read, usually, and they are done in that one brief reading.  Novels can last multiple hours or days, and in some cases weeks.  I've never read a short story longer than an hour.  (I'm not counting novellas in this category). 

Many times I'll read a short story to go to sleep instead of delving into one of the novels that I might be reading.  Unlike a novel, a short story ends and you don't want to push on to the next chapter.  That is a danger trying to read novels before bed.  You get the desire to see what rests over that page break.

Now as for writing them.  I like to write short stories for the reasons like to read them.  They are short and compact.  Long narratives have a tendency to bore me, even when i'm writing it.  I get lost in it and overwhelmed and wish that I was just writing a short story. 

This form keeps us (writers) concise and  brief.  A short story doesn't allow for long winded ramblings, except for Faulkner but he was known for that.  It keeps us on our toes and making sure every single word counts (because of word count). 

I also found that when writing a longer work, the  short story helps to cleanse the pallette as well.  It clears it of some things that might be floating around in the imagination but not right for the longer work.  It also gives a break to let the longer work work on its own issues away from the keyboard.

 So in conclusion, I think the short story is the breakfast of champions, and swing of water that we need to keep on keeping on.

Posted by Jared at 08:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is PS to my entry on Harlan Ellison's short story.  In that entry I discussed how the horror of the story was that of becoming part of a city.  I talked about the fear that rural dwellers have that city will eat us alive.  I left off one thing that was important to that entry, but I think is something to say anyway.

Southerns have a similar fear about areas that are not Southern (ie Northern).  We have Yankee fear if you will.  Remember that as a true Southerner, anything north of Tennesee, Virginia (which is questionable itself), Arkansas and Texas (again questionable) is Yankee. 

When I travel North or West or anywhere out of the old Confederacy, I have a fear that something is going to happen to me.  We are told (we being Southerners) that Yankees are rude and very mean.  We get told urban legends about gangs of people who will kill you if they hear you have an accent.  And you never ever tell them you're from Alabama.  (I suppose other Southern states have similar issues.)  We fear the rudeness of the Yankee.  It is because we are a vanquished people who were occupied. 

I jst though maybe Harlan Ellison could write a story about Southern fear of Yankees.

Posted by Jared at 08:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Harlan Ellison's story "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" took me by surprise.  This was not a horror story I expected it to be.  It started out as a loose retelling of the Kitty Genovese case from the point of view of one of the witnesses.  Then it turned around and became something different. 

Although the character in the story experiences many horrors,  (She witnesses the murder but does nothing, she's pretty much raped by her date, and she's mugged and almost killed herself with the witness  watching just like Kitty Genovese.) the real horror is that she becomes the same as most everyone else in New York.  She becomes part of the great unsympathetic, bitter, cynical tribe of New York, or in a more general term the city. 

This story has a bit more umpf with me because I'm a country boy.  I've lived, except for about a five year stint, in rural Alabama.  Even when I lived in the city, they were small unassuming cities (the college town of Tuscaloosa [Roll Tide] and the port city of Mobile).  One of the things the main character of this story has is the sensiblity of having lived in Vermont a rather rural state, much like Alabama with small cities.  She is not prepared for the harshness of living in a metropolis.  The horror of the story is she becomes the city.  The city itself is the monster.  It carries on like a vampire in the night devouring those innocents either by killing them off or making them one of its own.

Growing up in a rural setting, even though I technically grew up in the Birmingham census area and problably could be considered metro area by influence, I was raised to fear the city.  We fear the crime that seems so random.  We fear the nonchalance of the people in concerns over issues that face us.  We fear the city with its hordes of people and traffic.  It's smells like desiel dragons roaring street noise.  When we go to the city, we're told to "keep your doors locked and eye open."  That is why this story spoke to me.  It told the story of what we ruralites think the city will do.

I've been many different places in many cities.  I always do the same thing.  I keep my doors locked and my eyes opened.  I don't go out after dark if I can avoid it.  It's all because of that rural fear that the city will consume me. 

Posted by Jared at 07:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The monster of Cthulhu stands out among the other monsters in horror.  He is not a created creature like Frankenstein’s monster.  He’s not a reanimated corpse or the undead, like zombies and vampires respectively.  Lycanthropy does not apply to him. Although he possesses mystical powers, a witch he is not.  He’s a god-like, alien creature that looks like an octopus mated with a dragon.  Cthulhu was an original monster born somewhere in space and resting deep in the ocean.

Lovecraft formulated an interesting character with Cthulhu.  He broke away from some of the monster conventions of the time and made his own creature.  Before this creation, Lovecraft wrote about Dagon the fish god of the Philistines, and other creatures he created seemed to come from a Piscean or amphibian background. 

Many Lovecraftian monsters including Cthulhu sprang from an oceanic background.  Perhaps this because at the time he was writing, Lovecraft could imagine nothing more alien than the creatures of the deep sea. 

Now I’m going to talk about all the creatures Lovecraft and his beloved Cthulhu have spawned.

Would any of the movies of the 1950’s with their weird space aliens and giant creatures from beneath the waves have been possible with out good Cthulhu?  Even the creature that lived in the Black Lagoon is a child of the squid-man himself.  Then venture out to creatures that look like his description.  Several characters (minor for the most part) in the Star Wars movies were Cthulhu-esque.  Jabba’s palace alone should have been on planet Lovecraft, not to mention Admiral Ackbar, and that weird thing on the Millennium Falcon with Lando during the battle scene in Return of the Jedi. 

The Simpsons are not excluded from the call of Cthulhu.  The characters of Springfield get a visit every Halloween from their good friends, Kang and Kodos, squid-like aliens bent of world domination.  Disney took two stabs at Cthulhu.  Admit it; you think Ursula from The Little Mermaid is sexy, with all that body language and giant wad of tentacles.  Don’t forget the last Disneyfication of Cthulhu, Davey Jones.  I very much doubt that the captain of the Flying Dutchman looks like Cthulhu, even if he’s bumped into him in the briny depths.

Posted by Jared at 06:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

H.P Lovecraft is tiresome.  There I said it; it’s out in the open.  Lots of famous horror and science-fiction writers have professed the he is one of the reasons they write, but if he got much more purple, Willy Wonka would have him juiced. In his discussion on supernatural horror, he talked about how gothic writers spent too much time with too frilly of words. What was that, Howard?  Did you say they were too flowery?  Did I read things right, you H.P. Lovecraft accused other writers of having too much purple prose in their writing?  Everything I’ve ever read with Lovecraft on it has oozed (no pun intended) with varying shades of violet.  If he weren’t such a racist, I would say that Lovecraft would be best represented by the African violet.

But to his credit, I will say he helped to change the “literature of the weird.”  Lovecraft especially liked for his monsters or sources of horror to come from the great expanses of space.  Cthulhu is no different.  He (if it has gender) came to earth from the stars and was worshipped as a god (an elder god to be exact.)  Many other Lovecraftian monsters were little more than alien creatures that landed on earth and found it ripe for the taking.  Until the Lovecraft era, most monsters of literature were ghost clanging chains in a castle of Italy.  He mentions this in his treatise on horror.  The creatures and monsters weren’t really from the unknown.  Lovecraft gave horror the fear of the unknown.  Most of his stories possess a creepy mood.  All his long-winded and flowery writing made sure that the reader got the creepy part.  He often told us of this instead of showing.

In The Call of Cthulhu, Lovecraft never lets the narrator give the first person vision of this horrible creature that has come from the stars to rest in the ocean.  We see it only in the idols, statues, bas-reliefs, and first-person, second-hand news.  This takes much of the scare out of the story.  For all the hideousness this creature bares, I’m not scared of Cthulhu.  I’m not frightened that at the end of the story he is still sleeping the depths of the pacific awaiting his chance to strike.  Big deal, Godzilla’s down there too, and he’s much tougher than a squid face creepy.

I think ultimately, Lovecraft could see everyone else’s flaws, but not his own.  He could see how early gothic novels were a bit over the top and unable to hold the reader’s belief.  He didn’t see the same problems with his own writing.  H. P. Lovecraft has inspired many.  I picked him up because others recommended him, but he’s dated like so many other old monster tales and tellers.  The problem is I’m afraid he might have been dated then.  Just my humble opinion though.

Posted by Jared at 06:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)