Sunday, so sad to see you leave me
Jun. 27th, 2004 03:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dotintheskyAgatha Christie wrote mystery novels with paper-thin characters. My journal is a mystery too, written by a paper-thin character. All diaries are mysterious, but none as much as mine – it’s a mystery to whom and why I write here. A brazilian phantom roams the land of badly put together sentences, rejecting and collecting friends who shall never meet in the flesh. In this land of diaries and words, a land like a giant garden, trees grow amongst the weeds. I’m in Queen’s Park, sitting underneath similar trees (I wish I knew what type they were – the world is full of names we have never been told or taught.) I’m in the shades. Kevin is in front of me, about 20 paces, sitting in the sun. He wears a bright blue zip-up jacket and sunglasses. He’s reading a book on Bosch, the 15th century master of the grotesque. It’s very typical of Kevin to be reading something like that.
I was sitting on the shaded side of the bench. I have now moved to where the sun is shining. The shadows of leaves play against my legs. I can hear the leaves above my head rustling, the occasional car driving by, children talking and the excited voices of a group of teenagers playing football on the other side of the park.
I wonder about the solitary people walking through the park. Where are they going? Why are they alone?
A woman sits down on my bench. She has shoulder-length brown hair and she looks to be in her early 40s. She wears a black cardigan, glasses and an aqua-marine skirt. She is eating two ice-creams at the same time while flipping through a newspaper.
The sun comes and goes, thanks to a myriad of clouds drifting in the sky from the west to the east. I have a novel resting against my left leg: The Marriage of Sticks by Jonathan Carroll. I found it in the library’s horror section. Kevin and I searched for horror novels a few weekends ago. We went to second hand stores in Notting Hill, and the main stores downtown. Some stores don’t carry horror novels anymore. They are now called “chillers”, and they aren’t really horror but stories about serial killers. Crime and murder are popular if committed by human beings. Nobody cares anymore about werewolves, vampires and zombies. The ghouls have been pushed into the kiddie section and given a beating by Harry Potter and his bully friends.
We found some classic horror novels in the second hand stores. They had grim covers and promised tales of gore and disaster. They were worth their 20 pence just for the covers alone. They were mostly written in the 70s and early 80s. Stories about the american president trapped inside a nuclear bunk – the only survivor of a world holocaust. Or I Am Legend, the story of the last human being in a world of vampires. If I wrote a horror novel, who would read it? Would I have to aim it at a “chiller” crowd?
My little creative bubble has burst.
I was sitting on the shaded side of the bench. I have now moved to where the sun is shining. The shadows of leaves play against my legs. I can hear the leaves above my head rustling, the occasional car driving by, children talking and the excited voices of a group of teenagers playing football on the other side of the park.
I wonder about the solitary people walking through the park. Where are they going? Why are they alone?
A woman sits down on my bench. She has shoulder-length brown hair and she looks to be in her early 40s. She wears a black cardigan, glasses and an aqua-marine skirt. She is eating two ice-creams at the same time while flipping through a newspaper.
The sun comes and goes, thanks to a myriad of clouds drifting in the sky from the west to the east. I have a novel resting against my left leg: The Marriage of Sticks by Jonathan Carroll. I found it in the library’s horror section. Kevin and I searched for horror novels a few weekends ago. We went to second hand stores in Notting Hill, and the main stores downtown. Some stores don’t carry horror novels anymore. They are now called “chillers”, and they aren’t really horror but stories about serial killers. Crime and murder are popular if committed by human beings. Nobody cares anymore about werewolves, vampires and zombies. The ghouls have been pushed into the kiddie section and given a beating by Harry Potter and his bully friends.
We found some classic horror novels in the second hand stores. They had grim covers and promised tales of gore and disaster. They were worth their 20 pence just for the covers alone. They were mostly written in the 70s and early 80s. Stories about the american president trapped inside a nuclear bunk – the only survivor of a world holocaust. Or I Am Legend, the story of the last human being in a world of vampires. If I wrote a horror novel, who would read it? Would I have to aim it at a “chiller” crowd?
My little creative bubble has burst.
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no subject
on 2004-06-27 08:35 am (UTC)see it from the other side:
making a journal and friends here is like creating a cyber-Tibetan-Mandala!
for Buddhism, a mandala is an imaginary palace that is contemplated during meditation, our imaginary palace might be LJ :P
both are impermanent structures, even we wont pour our journal into a river...
no subject
on 2004-06-27 08:48 am (UTC)Thank you.
:)
no subject
on 2004-06-27 08:49 am (UTC)no subject
on 2004-06-27 09:22 am (UTC)Horror's pond has been killed by the big fish in a very small pond... A lot of modern horror is pants though. It's really uninspired and pulpy. A very hard genre to write effectively... Still, if you add new twists and styles to it, there's still scope for publication - Christopher Fowler's a prime example of someone who's succeeded in recent times by doing that without resorting to penning lacklustre "chillers" - so don't give up!
(Ever read any early Peter Straub stuff btw? If you want some i1nspiration for how to write 'traditional' horror quite breathtakingly, try "Ghost Story" or "If You Could See Me Now"...)
no subject
on 2004-06-28 12:29 pm (UTC)What you said about Koontz and King is very true. It's the both of them, plus Richard Laymon (who is very poor) and Anne Rice. Have you read Poppy Z. Brite? She was someone who could have also grown in the genre but now she's run away to food genre. By the way, she has a livejournal -
My ideal horror novel would be a mixture between S. Jackson (who wrote "Haunt of the Hill House"), Peter Straub and... hmm, Jonathan Carroll.
What other horror novels have you read or can suggest?
no subject
on 2004-06-28 12:54 pm (UTC)Straub's one of my favourite authors. I think his only flaw is that he took influence from Stephen King (an infinitely lesser author)...
Some of his later stuff is worthwhile too (did you ever read "Koko" (slightly overlong (again the King influence) but very powerful) or "Houses Without Doors" (one worth reading twice to fully take in)?) but I think he exploded the wealth of his potential into "Ghost Story" and everything afterwards has just been trying to grasp that peak again.
Richard Laymon was totally the same as Koontz and King - same formula, different setting every time. Rice has always been pretty uninteresting for me. Poppy Z Brite is/was a great writer, but never got beyond being formulaic ("Lost Souls" is great, but everything hence that I've read has been only a slight variation on it).
I take it you've read Lovecraft?
Have you read any of Joe R Lansdale's "horror" stuff, like "The Drive-In"? Very lighthearted, but it springs to mind as good...
Michael Marshall Smith, although not technically "horror" has done something deeply chilling, supernaturally-tinged stuff - I'd highly recommend his book of short stories, "What You Make It", if you've not already read it... the first story alone kept me awake all night after I read it - very disturbing/grotesque stuff.
I used to read a ton of genre stuff when I was younger (Ramsey Campbell, John Farris, Guy N Smith, Shaun Hutson et al) but I've read some of their stuff more recently and found it's really puerile and not at all satisfying as an adult... :/
I have to admit I enjoy a bit of Dennis Wheatley, although it's a guilty pleasure... "The Haunting of Toby Jugg" (if you excuse how badly it's dated) is *VERY* creepy indeed and beautifully written.
no subject
on 2004-06-29 01:51 am (UTC)no subject
on 2004-06-27 10:04 am (UTC)no subject
on 2004-06-28 12:29 pm (UTC);)
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on 2004-06-28 01:52 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2004-06-27 10:06 am (UTC)no subject
on 2004-06-28 12:31 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2004-06-28 12:43 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2004-06-28 12:50 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2004-06-28 12:53 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2004-06-29 01:49 am (UTC)just a reminder of stuff you already know
on 2004-06-27 10:37 am (UTC)i did a quick search and found this(http://www.filmsite.org/horrorfilms.html),
which gives a brief chronology of horror movies. I think this quote (from that site) sums up pretty well what it is, beyond thrills and dating effects, that gets to people:
"Horror films, when done well and with less reliance on horrifying special effects, can be extremely potent film forms, tapping into our dream states and the horror of the irrational and unknown, and the horror within man himself. (The best horror films only imply or suggest the horror in subtle ways, rather than blatantly displaying it, i.e., Val Lewton's horror films.) In horror films, the irrational forces of chaos or horror invariably need to be defeated, and often these films end with a return to normalcy and victory over the monstrous."
How Jungian can you get?
I'm sure, too, that legions of cultural studies people have written about how the fears of different generations have been embodied in particular symbolic forms/conventions.
(is it possible that 50s alien invasion and body snatching movies are somehow related to the fear of communism? and there's a reason that Stepford Wives worked in the 70s, but not so much today... Rosemary's Baby i think is still pretty freaky though, and i think it's not a stretch to link it to 60s stuff (societal rethinking/confusion re: women's bodies; also, cautionary stuff re: increasing secularization/agnosticism [christ story inverted]) I think that's probably how you can make things relevant/compelling...
like The Ring... you have the universal shit that freaks us out - a ghost, a creepy eye, the ring image itself (evocative of all kinds of scary stuff - losing the self in a vast, looming, threatening unknown). then there's the contemporary stuff - most of us don't really understand the technology we use, because of a specialist society, and i for one have a vague and semi-magical understanding of electricity itself (having foregone science classes early on in favor of language and music)...
maybe you could get inspired by writing casually on the sociological lines that are in your story?
Re: just a reminder of stuff you already know
on 2004-06-28 12:36 pm (UTC)But, speaking of real horrors, I was also thinking about the war in Iraq, the atrocities perpetrated against other human beings, and in a way those horrors are so much more powerful and hard to deal with. It makes me feel that if I were to write a horror story I'd have to keep at the back of my mind that either that story reflects some of the modern horrors surrounding us or I run the chance of writing something truly lame (ala Freddy Krueger.)
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on 2004-06-27 10:39 am (UTC)no subject
on 2004-06-28 12:36 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2004-06-27 11:18 am (UTC):)
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on 2004-06-28 12:38 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2004-06-27 11:25 am (UTC)no subject
on 2004-06-28 12:39 pm (UTC)