3 posts tagged “horror”

I haven't written about books in a while, because ha ha who has time to write about books? Who has time to read books? Mostly I just read and write for work these days: it's starting to make me feel stupid, so I've been running around the house trying to find any relatively highbrow literature that I own and haven't read yet. Need brain stretch!

Here are three things I've read recently. I didn't finish any of them.

 

 

20th Century Ghosts, by Joe Hill.

OK, everyone knows by now that Joe Hill is one of Stephen King's kids, and everyone knows that he has oodles of genuine talent of his own.

I don't really read horror much anymore, though I was really into horror in the late 1990s. I started to find it tiresome. The thing with genre is: it's not true that it's automatically worse than mainstream realistic literature. But much of it is not necessarily better, either, so the "really great writers" in the horror genre (and in most others) are not writing great literature, they're writing very good commercial fiction. And there is nothing wrong with that, but it's not always what I'm in the mood for.

When I looked at the most recent Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, it seemed like the majority of stories chosen by Ellen Datlow (the horror side of the volume) were stories about being stuck in the hinterlands with something scary, bad backwoods-America dialect included. Add to that "so-and-so has been kidnapped by a serial killer," and you have something like 60% of all short horror fiction. It gets boring after a while, particularly when the writers are good-not-spectacular. (For me, I don't like reading a writer and knowing that I am as good as them or better; I like reading a writer from whom I can learn something, or who challenges me intellectually. For example, among the new stars of fantasy, I'm so impressed with Scott Lynch's amazing "ear" for dialogue. The rhythm is fantastic.)

So, what I'm getting at: Joe Hill is a wonderful writer, who occasionally writes things I don't like, but this collection is uneven. Christopher Golden did the intro, and has written a lot of vampire fiction, and liked the story "Abraham's Boys," which recasts Van Helsing as a fanatical, vampire-fearing sadist with two sons who hate his guts. I did not particularly like this story; there's a whole list of reasons why I didn't like it. (It's not really based on the characters, except in name only and with Dracula as a framing device. It's darker than anything I want to read right now in a way that I don't enjoy, which is nothing against the story itself; I'm just not into horror. I thought the characterization was heavy-handed.) There are several stories of the "escape from a serial killer" variety.

However, three I liked a lot:

The title story is about the ghost of a young woman who died suddenly in a movie theater during the first showing of The Wizard of Oz, and who manifests in that theater. All the people she manifests to are deeply affected by it, and somehow wind up with careers closely connected to the cinema, not least the boy she appeared to in the mid-1940s who wound up owning the theater for the rest of his life. This story, which I think is mostly about longing, has a peculiar beauty in spite of its "horrifying" moments.

There's a story a bit later which isn't a horror story at all (Hill has written in and out of genre); it lives more in the land of magical realism, and no, I don't mean "Mexico or Colombia." A kid's best friend is an inflatable boy. There's never any explanation of why the kid is inflatable: they live in a world where being born as a blow-up doll is an infrequent birth defect, and that's just how it is. He works around the logic of exactly what it would mean to be an inflatable person: mean kids would try to prick you, you'd have to avoid dog bites and excessive heat, the scars of your childhood would be covered by rubber patches. This one is quirky and elegaic.

The last of the stories I enjoyed a lot... you know, I can't remember right now. If I do remember it, I'll come back and add it. It might have been the one about the guy you think will be a serial killer all the way through the story, but he turns out to be a hero.

 

Salon Fantastique: Fifteen Original Tales of Fantasy edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.

This anthology didn't really have a theme, other than "Hey, you're awesome, write us a story." I have heard a lot of praise for it, but I thought it was middling... definitely better than all those Sword and Sorceress anthologies that have given many, many young writers of heroic fantasy their start, but, you know, not Borges. And again, it's not that any of the stories I didn't like were bad... it's that they reminded me of 10 other fantasies I've read. (For example, I like Catherynne Valente, but her story here essentially reminded me of The Tower at Stony Wood by Patricia McKillip and the Ceres: Celestial Legend manga. There's really only so much you can do with a selkie. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't a standout.)

Of what I read here (not all of the stories), I was floored by Jedediah Berry's contribution. It's about a few people living in a cabin in the 1890s, running out of food for the winter, constantly negotiating with spirits who live on the perimeter of their now-spent farmland. The wife is narcoleptic and sleeps more and more; the husband has one leg and is constantly enticed by the spirits with visions of their son, a childhood suicide. A mysterious young woman, who may need to forget that she was once a Queen of either the spirits, the natives, or both, has moved in with them and does the cooking, and they've co-opted a visiting surveyor. It could be chilling, but for some reason, it's just dreamy and heartbreaking. (And I don't remember the title because I've already returned the book to the library.)

I also liked Gregory Maguire's story, which isn't really a fantasy: it's about what a gay-or-bisexual young soldier, shot in WW1, sees as he's dying, and as his lover tries to save him. Historically, I can't get into Maguire's stuff (I have most of his novels and have yet to finish even one of them), so I was pleased to like this one.

I read other stories in this anthology, but either couldn't get into them or didn't find them that interesting when I finished. Again, it's the issue of, yes, these are good writers, but ultimately I can't get into the stories they're telling.

 

Clubbing by Andi Watson & Josh Howard

No, no no, no no no.

I normally like Andi Watson's stuff; it's a bit fluffy, but sweet. This one is from DC's Minx line, which has made a lot of noise lately with books like The PLAIN Janes (which I thought was just OK, though illustrated by a friend of my fiance's -- the art is the best I've seen in a Minx book so far, which I'll get to in a minute) and Re-Gifters (which is my favorite of the Minx books I've read so far, about a teen Korean-American girl who has a mad crush on one of her classmates as they both attempt to compete in a martial-arts championship).

I can't really fault Minx books for being what they are: designed for girls in their early teens. From that POV, there's nothing much wrong with Clubbing, though it would probably still count as a bit shallow. The premise has promise: average teen goth girl (fashion obsessed, prone to sneaking out to clubs and lying about her age or to make herself seem more cool, etc) gets caught lying about her age to sneak into a club, then shipped off to visit her grandparents in the country. Her name is Charlotte.

 

The grandparents own a small golf resort in the Lake District; the grandmother is appropriately grandmotherly, while the grandfather is an old military man who seems like every "Old Colonel" cliche in every British book, film, or radio or television show ever. Oh, the amusement as ultra-urban ubergoth Charlotte tries to fit in with the yokels! Then a woman from her grandparents' circle makes a few mysterious remarks to Charlotte and ends up dead on the golf course -- clubbed to death, IIRC. (The title is a threefold pun.) It's a silly mystery and the solution is as far-fetched as you can imagine, but if I say that the premise of the whole thing is very similar to the movie Hot Fuzz, you might get the idea.

 

 

Disaffected junior punk/goth/emo girls in their early teens might like Clubbing, but I thought it was feather-weight and paper-thin and not even worth finishing. And Hot Fuzz is much more entertaining... so skip Clubbing and watch that instead.

The art is charming enough, but beware: a lot of artists whose work is put out at this size work much larger (12x15 is, I think, what my fiance does, maybe 14x17). It allows them to send in resized image files that makes their art look crazy detailed, because they shrink it down. (This is how my fiance works, and he's very open about it. He did a book for Oni, and Minx has mined a lot of Oni's talent, though not him yet. I think he would love having the work itself, but would not enjoy the following stricture:)

Minx requires its artists to draw the art at around the same size as it will be when published, so as a result, the art in their books is not very detailed. They also require a certain degree of speed, which doesn't help the look of the eventual art.

Someone I know (not my fiance) who was approached -- and eventually rejected -- to write a book for them explained some stuff about what one of the editors is looking for; the criteria ("put in something weird!") is such that you can expect to see more ridiculous plots like the one in Clubbing. Seriously, Andi Watson seems like a really cool guy with whom I'd totally like to be friends, but shelve this one with his lesser works. Mostly, it's about Charlotte's succession of really cute outfits, with a very light emphasis on her relationships with her grandparents.

Meanwhile, I'll be on the lookout for a book that engages me enough that I can finish it. Gilbert Hernandez's Palomar stories might be just the ticket. Sopa de Pena! I'm also going to hit Middlemarch or The Diamond Age soon: supposedly awesome books I own but have never read.

And Spamalot tickets for the family, because apparently they all want to go.

I always tell people that Murakami is one of my favorite authors, but to be honest, I find his work hit-and-miss. The thing is, when it hits, it hits hard.

The last of his books that I finished was Sputnik Sweetheart, and I thought it was one of his worst, nearly incomprehensible. (I own Kafka on the Shore, but haven't read it yet; it seems decent. Everything else in the interim has been short stories, I think.) Sputnik Sweetheart is pertinent to After Dark because they deal with similar themes, and because After Dark may help illuminate what's actually going on in its predecessor.

After Dark takes place over the course of a single night in Tokyo. The book centers on two sisters: nineteen-year-old Mari Asai, a student, and her beautiful older sister Eri, a model/actress. A young man, Takahashi, sees Mari in a Denny's, late at night, and decides to talk to her based on the fact that they'd gone on a double date several years earlier. When his friend Kaoru, who runs a love hotel, needs the assistance of someone who speaks Chinese, Takahashi points her in Mari's direction. One of the love hotel's customers has brutally beaten a Chinese prostitute, and Mari's help is needed to converse with the girl and get her back on her feet.

The rest of the evening - the rest of the book - mostly centers on Mari and Takahashi making a connection, which gives her someone to talk to, for the first time, about her feelings towards her sister. Meanwhile, something mysterious is happening to Eri, the meaning of which becomes clear to anyone who pays attention to the conversations that Mari has with the people she meets. Finally, we get a glimpse into the life of the guy who beat up the prostitute, and an idea of why he might have done such a thing.

At its core, I think After Dark is about people who feel isolated and how isolation affects them. One seems to both seek and resent isolation, reaching out for connection in inappropriate and ineffective ways, while rejecting connections that are more healthy. Another is isolated by their position in life and by a variety of health problems. A third is isolated, maybe, by issues of personality and self-esteem. For some of the characters, isolation is not just a feeling, but also a place*... a world that exists on the other side of mirrors, or inside a television, or in a dark office.

I liked this and would recommend it.

* The relatively straightforward explanation of what's probably happening to Eri is what I think has the most relation to the mysteries of Sputnik Sweetheart. It's been about four years since I read that one, though, so I'd have to read it again to be sure.

                         

Other stuff:

 

Trial of Flowers by Jay Lake - Lake is supposedly making a name for himself in the fantasy/horror field (this book is a little of each).

I read the first few chapters of this and skimmed the rest. I am not qualified to review a book I didn't read. I can say that in the first few chapters, there was way too much telling and not enough showing; I'm not impressed with Lake as a writer, but I've seen plenty who are worse. On top of that, none of the protagonists is particularly engaging... everything here is grotesque. One protagonist is a politician's aide and a sexual sadist; another is the dwarf who raised him; a third is an unreliable loser from a dishonored family who scrabbles to recover some position.

In the City Imperishable (motto: The City Is), dwarfs are made much more commonly than born - remember the Bonsai Kitten joke from a few years ago? The Sewn faction of the City's dwarfs (Lake's preferred plural) is a group of highly educated (captive audience) people whose growth was intentionally stunted by raising them in boxes. The sides of their mouths were sewn shut, leaving a small opening and tiny pursed lips. There is a revolutionary rival faction of dwarfs, the Slashed, whose mouths are not sewn shut.

Lots of politics, plus plenty of bodily fluids, eventually including sand. This will appeal to some, but I am not personally interested in this sort of thing right now... it's a shame Lake didn't write it ten years ago. There's nothing wrong with his imagination, but I prefer my fantasy novels with less torture and degradation, thanks. Contrast this book to something that I liked, like Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora, and you may understand why I didn't go on with it.

 

I've been hearing about Alison Bechdel for years, because I read what used to be called alternative comics, but I never read anything of hers until Fun Home came out last year. It was almost certainly the best graphic novel of 2006, so I wanted to read more of her work.

This involves admitting something embarrassing about myself, something that a lot of straight people do until they call themselves on it: a tendency to shy away from queer-identified material, particularly reading material, both because we think that it's primarily aimed at queer people (and thus not "for" us) and because we don't want people who see us toting it around to think that we're queer. (And not just because of physical safety issues - fear of being gay-bashed - either.) How can I say that I don't think there is any shame in being gay when I was acting ashamed that someone might think I was gay? When I realized that I really don't care if someone, particularly some random person in the library, thinks I might be a lesbian, that opened my reading up a lot.

Dykes to Watch Out For is sort of a queer-identified, politically liberal-to-radical take on For Better or For Worse or something similar. The characters age, date, break up, have children, and so on. Some of the characters live in a communal house; at this point in the story, which has been running for around 20 years, there are male characters, straight characters, bi characters, a young transgendered girl, and a young conservative Evangelical Christian lesbian trying to come to terms with how her sexuality impacts her position in her own community.

This book is fairly recent, with comics from 2003 to early 2005. There are a number of earlier books in the series. It's my first, but it won't be my last. Anything that you like about any ongoing comic about the lives of a small group of friends and family is probably true of this one, and it's definitely worth a look if that kind of story appeals to you. So as far as who it's "for," I would say, "Anyone looking for a good slice-of-life comic." (If, on the other hand, lesbian sex offends you, or you're really conservative yourself, you probably won't like this. But if you really are that conservative, I don't know why you're reading my blog, unless we're related.)

I've been waiting excitedly for months to see Pan's Labyrinth, and I finally had the chance last night. Certain things about it surprised me, despite the fact that I'd heard it was an adults-only fairy tale. I would like to be able to discuss them here, without giving away the ending per se, and share a few stills, so if you are avoiding spoilers assiduously, you might want to skip looking at the full version of this post until after you've seen the film.

First of all, the ad campaign has been saturating American TV so heavily that the theater was packed, which I thought was notable, given that it's a Spanish-language film with subtitles. The complex chose to use the same screen they'd used for Pirates of the Caribbean 2, which has a fairly large seating area, one about standard for a stadium-seating multiplex. It was nearly full. I think this is going to wind up being one of the more successful foreign-language films in recent history. 

The subtitles are white, not yellow, which in a general sense can sometimes make subtitles hard to view - I didn't have that sort of problem with this film, though. I did have a problem with the subtitles occasionally flashing too quickly, but that might have been because I was sleep-deprived.

The ad campaign has been somewhat dishonest, glossing over the film's extensive horror element and making it look perhaps more fantastic than it actually is (also glossing over the fact that it's not in English, but I knew that). The truth is that there are only two otherworldly fantasy sequences, except a brief one near the end, and that both are pretty disturbing (the first only because it's a bit disgusting, not scary). My only other major criticism, except for that, is the fact that the otherworldly elements do not tie in well with the real-world events of the film - they don't seem to affect each other at all until the very end.

Most of the film is grounded in a realistic setting, Spain in 1944; the fantastic element occasionally intrudes on it. Franco's fascist regime is trying to retain control; local leftist guerrilla revolutionaries fight the regime whenever possible.

Ofelia is a 10-year-old girl whose widowed mother has recently married a fascist Captain. Ofelia's mother is very pregnant at the beginning of the film, and Captain Vidal is obviously much more enamored of his putative "son" than of his new wife, who he seems to view as the vehicle for his offspring-based immortality. The new family is staying in an old mill in a rural district. The mill has an impossibly old stone labyrinth on its grounds; the whole complex has a strange, decrepit grandeur (in some ways comparable to the abandoned convent inhabited by most of the major characters in the film version of The English Patient).  

Reviewers have, in their plot summaries, tended to paint the Captain as a different sort of monster than he actually is. While he is indeed "brutal," and squarely the film's villain, he isn't actually physically or sexually abusive to his family. Aside from some unpleasantry at their first meeting, where he squeezes her hand tightly because she offers him the "wrong one," it's 3/4 of the way through the film before he touches Ofelia again, to slap her once across the face at a time when he is understandably upset. His brutality is expressed more in his official capacity, where he tends to kill prisoners before asking questions, and functions as a very efficient torturer. This doesn't mean that he adores Ofelia by any means: his disregard for her becomes increasingly clear as the film builds to its climax. But if you're expecting that he beats or molests her, from what reviews have suggested, it's not the case. 

I also haven't seen it mentioned very much that the film actually has two heroines:  Ofelia is the obvious one, the mythic child heroine, but there's a more grounded and conventional heroic figure in Mercedes, the revolutionary spy in the Captain's household. Mercedes aids the local resistance by acting as a courier; she also smuggles medicine to them and makes it possible for them to steal supplies. She's the only person to effectively stand up to Captain Vidal in any capacity through most of the film. One wonders if Mercedes was also tested by Pan as a child; if so, she failed the first test and was abandoned by the otherworld thereafter.

For me, interpretation is based on the question: is Ofelia delusional? It seems like she may be, except for the fact that the mandrake root that the Faun gives her is definitely real. If she is delusional, or dreaming, the film's denouement is almost unbearably sad.

There are some other questions, which won't make sense to those who haven't seen the movie. (Ex: why does she eat the grapes? She didn't go to the Ogre's hall until several days after she was sent to bed without dinner, so it can't be that she's starving. If the reasoning is that she loves grapes and they are almost impossible to get in her daily life, it's not established in the film. The best explanation I can muster is that she was "correct" about which lock to use, in spite of what the fairies were telling her, so she got cocky and decided to disobey the other instructions. One of the unanswered questions is what would have happened if she had followed the fairies' instructions and opened the central lock - was what she actually needed behind that door, and the dagger she retrieved a setting onto a different path? Or was the misdirection part of the test, as it seemed to be throughout the rest of the story? Pan is a trickster god.)

 

 

The scene displayed in these two photos, which is also the one with the grape-eating, is one of the more disturbing things I've seen in a while. There's a commentary by Frank Darabont at deltorofilms.com, discussing a party thrown for the director Guillermo del Toro on his return to Hollywood from a lengthy stay in Spain, where the film was made. Pan's Labyrinth was shown at the party, and a few "celebrity reactions" are mentioned, including "Clive Barker was smiling like a proud papa." Well, much of the movie is very Barker-like, in some ways comparable to his book The Thief of Always (I own, but haven't yet read, Abarat). Baroque, gothic fantasy elements combined with grotesquerie and a creeping sense of unease. 

The comparison is most appropriate to this Ogre scene. The trailers make it look like a thing of wonder, "Ofelia meets a whimsical creature that sees out of the palms of its hands!' - but no. Ofelia meets a child-eating Ogre who she has to avoid waking up while she steals an artifact from him during a test that will determine whether she is a reincarnation of the lost Princess Moanna, daughter of the King of the Underworld. 

 

 

This is a sequence that, while it's beautifully done, I could have lived approximately forever without seeing.

I loved this movie, but I found it deeply upsetting and increasingly difficult to watch, between the various torture scenes and casual point-blank shootings and shambling ogres and bloody obstetric incidents and faunic tantrums.

Even so, even if it's not for everyone, I think all creative people and people interested in myth and/or fantasy should see it, because I think the imagery and storytelling is inspiringly rich. Not as a lesson in creativity, but as direct inspiration.