Sunday, so sad to see you leave me

[dotinthesky]

Agatha 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.

Comments

[suede.livejournal.com]

"rejecting and collecting friends who shall never meet in the flesh"
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...

[naturalbornkaos.livejournal.com]

I love the horror genre (proper horror that is, not "serial killer chillers"), but alas I'm in the minority. The genre has been pushed fairly underground and, sad to say, I think that's perhaps due to a profound lack of imagination on behalf of most of its authors and also due to Stephen bloody King. Go to a bookstore and, if they DO have a horror section, they'll have almost every book he's written but almost nothing by any other author. A damn shame since He's not even been a very good author since about 1978! You might find a few Clive Barker ones (although even he moved more into Fantasy than horror) and Dean Koontz (another Stephen King - ie: writes the same book every time) but that's it...

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"...)

[theoriginalme.livejournal.com]

That was really well done.

[dilvalicious.livejournal.com]

i would read it, perhaps.

just a reminder of stuff you already know

[lala-jones.livejournal.com]

Hey O, I've never attempted to formulate any serious thought about horror. i usually associate it with crap like Freddie and Jason, or gore, and most recently with the spoofs (thinking of movies, obviously). the only really scary one i can think of is The Ring.

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?

[lala-jones.livejournal.com]

stuff stuff stuff it nate

[roguejournal.livejournal.com]

you make me feel like reading.....
:)

[phyrephly.livejournal.com]

i like this wistful little post